I do a lot of typing on my computer. A lot of the messages I send are to message boards like this. To me, it is a pain to keep pressing the shift key. It is so much easier to type like this,
IT IS SO MUCH MORE CONVIENENT AND QUICK TO TYPE LIKE THIS. It really is. Some anal retentive person several years has stated that this was “yelling” or “screaming” and has deemed that this is rude. This is a silly rationale. How can reading someone’s message be considered a loud voice? Sounds schitzophrenic to me.
I WANT THE FREEDOM TO LET MY MESSAGE ACROSS LIKE THIS. GOD THIS IS SO EASY TO TYPE. HOW FAST IT IS. SOME ASSHOLE WITH VOICES IN HIS HEAD SAID THIS WAS YELLING AND THE WHOLE INTERNET COMMUNITY BELIEVES HIM.
If you want to communicate effectively, you have to stay within the conventions of your chosen media. Convention says pretty clearly that caps are used for emphasis.
Incidentally, experiments were made, eons ago, to determine what all caps (or all lowercase) do to the readability of a text - back when, not having to encode an extra bit of information per character could make a notable difference in transmission speed. It is considerably slower to read an all-caps text. (Of course, telex machines were then designed to print in all caps anyway. Go figure. Probably Management was involved somewhere.)
Not staying within convention - and making your communication harder to read, to boot - means that you’re making the rest of us work harder at decoding your communication for your own convenience’s sake. Some would call that rude. I’d just skip your posts.
No, it’s more convenient to learn how to properly type. For me, it’s more convenient to ignore posts that are in all caps, as they are harder to read, are distracting, and are rude. They convey that you’re not interested enough to offer the courtesy of common convention, and past experience suggests that users who type in all caps have little interest in normal discourse. Is that what you’re trying to convey?
You have that freedom. Just like I have the freedom to ignore anything written in all caps by some fucktwad* who doesn’t believe in the basic rules of written English.
I only threw that in to meet the Pit minimum insult quota.
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Telex machines (and line printers, in general) were made all caps for speed. The print chains were physical devices that had to have each character moved to the correct location over the paper before striking the letter. The more characters one allowed on the print chain, the more movement was required by the print chain and the longer it took to position any given character before striking. In the interest of speed, all lower case characters were simply “mapped” to the upper case character strikers so that regardless of capitalization, the same striker would be used, shortening the chain and increasing the speed. (On some chains, they simply mapped all lower-case and special characters to the blank, so that nothing even printed if the “wrong” signal came along.) That changed when printer technology shifted from striking characters to ink-jet and laser technology in which the formation of a character did not rely on a finding a physical character to strike.
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As to the OP, the decision regarding caps was not made because “Some anal retentive person several years has stated” that it was bad. All forms of communication develop conventions. (Without conventions, there would be no communication, as each attempt would require the participants to work out the protocols at the beginning of each attempt at communication.) The convention used in the days of ascii text exchanges was to highlight words by flanking them with underscores or asterisks or some other special character and to emphasize a “raised voice” by using all caps. It was not anal retentive; it was not capricious. It was a convention. Such conventions still apply in many newsgroups (although greater flexibility in using HTML has decreased, not eliminated, the practice in places where ascii text is still the primary medium of expression).
Nothing in spoken language prevents you from ending each statement in a rising inflection or each question in a falling inflection. Those are simply conventions that we use in most Indo-European languages. It is the convention that we do not grab the head of a person to whom we are speaking, turn that person’s head, and speak directly into the ear, although that may get the sounds of our words to them more directly. (Silly conventions!)
Of course, you may violate any convention if you wish. You will simply appear to be an idiot to anyone with whom you speak. Given that the point of posting is to provide information or exchange views with other posters, doing something to your post that will deliberately cause them to ignore you (especially while declaring your laziness as your justification) is just a bit self-defeating.
Why is yelling rude?
I do a lot of yelling during my day. A lot of the messages I yell are to my co-workers at work. To me, it is a pain to keep my voice down. It is so much easier to hear my when I yell like this,
IT IS SO MUCH MORE CONVIENENT AND QUICK TO YELL LIKE THIS. It really is. Some person several years ago has stated that this “yelling” or “screaming” is rude. This is a silly rationale. How can it be considered rude to hear a loud voice? Sounds schitzophrenic to me.
I WANT THE FREEDOM TO LET MY MESSAGE ACROSS LIKE THIS. GOD THIS IS SO EASY TO YELL. HOW FAST IT IS. SOME ASSHOLE WITH VOICES IN HIS HEAD SAID THIS YELLING WAS RUDE AND THE WHOLE COMMUNITY BELIEVES HIM.
Why, because his statements are obviously so gloriously bursting with supernal revelations that he just has to type and post them right this minute or they’ll vanish into the aether. Pausing only to hit the caps lock, apparently.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell ‘God’ correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
Amen, brother! Er, I mean AMEN BROTHER! All day long, my poor pinkies, just pressing pressing pressing with no respite! Sometimes I have to ice them down when I get home. Oh! And “q” and “p” too; it’s a real pain to have to extend the pinkies out that 1/64 of a inch to reach those keys. I suggest we do away with them as well.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put my poor left pinky in a sling.
Jodi gets her left pinkie in a sling for straining to reach the caps lock, friedo gets his ass in a sling for teaching the idiot how to misuse the size tags.
