What I didn’t expect was what My friend said after making a Lemmy account on her chosen website — “I don’t like it because it looks like Old Reddit. I have to click on each post to view it”.
Sometimes people tell you something and it just ends a friendship…
I really hate that that writer capitalizes every instance of ‘Me’, ‘My’, ‘Mine’, etc… it changes my internal inflection when reading, and really fucks up the flow of the text.
Here’s an explanation of My pronouns: https://medium.com/@viridiangrail/introduction-to-capitalised-pronouns-f5140e722b48
[…]because nearly everyone who speaks English is a capitalised pronouns user. I. The subject form of the first person pronoun. While it’s not a matter of importance to most people, it is still the proper form used in legal documents and anything else that needs to be done “correctly”. And it got that way because someone, at some point in history, felt their pronoun ought to be capitalised and convinced everyone else to generally agree.
This is as far as I got. That isn’t why we capitalise “I”, as others have pointed out, and if the argument held true then we’d capitalise “Me” as well, which we don’t in English.
You’ve clearly thought about this enough that anything I say isn’t going to change your mind, so I’m just addressing the actual argument being made in that opening paragraph because it’s categorically incorrect. I’m not going to bother reading the rest because I’m bored already. You might as well try to fight the tide on stuff like this.
I say that as someone who got tired of people shortening their name and instead changed their name to one that cannot be shortened because it’s the only effective way to accomplish the objective.
That never uses or explains the use of “My”.
It’s actually not even explaining anything I imagined. It’s explaining, that some people want others to capitalize the pronouns used to refer to them specifically. I was thinking of a grammatical choice to always or never capitalize pronouns uniformly. But changing grammar rules on the whims of the person being written about, seems exceptionally odd. The closest I ever heard of to that, is in the spelling someone’s name.
In reality it doesn’t explain anything other than to say, some people want it that way. It never goes into actually explaining the logic of that desire. It merely tries to shame people for not doing it if requested.
I use capitalised pronouns because I like them. That’s what the article explains. The reasons that people like their preferred pronouns don’t tend to go any deeper than that.
Maybe a story will feel more complete: 4 years ago, while My goddess-mother was helping Me understand My gender, She suggested I try out capitalised pronouns. I did, and I liked them. As good as she/her felt compared to using he/him, that’s how They/Them felt compared to she/her. I liked them, so I kept them.
We aren’t talking about They/Them vs she/her.
This is about They/Them vs they/them.I can see there might be an argument for people to capitalize all pronouns.
Doing it only for 1st and 2nd person pronouns might be my preference. I can see it accentuating a dialog happening between the reader and writer.
But asking everyone to break a grammatical convention, specifically only for you; Giving no justification other than “I like it”, seems insufficient.If I were to tell you to use all caps when referring to ME, would that be reasonable?
What about all lower case, even when starting a sentence?No. If you want everyone to change a standard grammatical convention specifically for you alone; One that’s been in place since the invention of the printing press (that’s when we started to capitalize “I”); You need to give more reason than you would for your favorite color.
Of course you and I both, can capitalize any word, however WE Want, for our Own empahAses.
If I were to tell you to use all caps when referring to ME, would that be reasonable?
What about all lower case, even when starting a sentence?Sure. My goddess-mother’s name was fractal, all lowercase. Even at the start of a sentence. Even when yelling in all caps. It was easy to do and made them happy.
Valuing the rules of grammar over people’s feelings seems like a very unusual choice. Personally, I think language should exist to help people, not the other way around.
But, perhaps the difference is generational. I haven’t spoken to very many people about this, but what I have noticed is a shift over time from menus to feeds on the internet. Forums are dying. Users don’t want to scroll search results, they want an AI to just give them the answer. And the difference seems to be generational. Perhaps informed by our early experiences with online platforms. It certainly cannot be an absolute distinction, but a correlation seems evident from the state of the world.
Extrapolates a distinction between number of questions and answer based on age from a tiny data set, acknowleeges large scale changes over time that applies to all ages, offhandedly mentions the actual reason (early experiences with the internet), then goes back to random speculation.
What a terribly incoherent article. Capitalizing ‘Mine’ made it a struggle. Why didn’t they capitalize ‘ours’ for consistency? If I was tha author I would assume it was because of generational self centeredness or something, because everything needs to be generational conflict!
