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Why Gen Z Made Capitalization Irrelevant
because lowercase is cooler, ofc.
If you text anyone below the ages of 20-25 or so, chances are, they don’t text like this. They don’t start their sentences with “I” or start a convo by saying “Hello.”
instead, we text like this. we start sentences with “what’s up” and “hey,” and even the dreaded “i” (definitely not following the rules of our elementary and middle school writing teachers — oops, sorry about that).
But why? Why is this a thing, and is it culturally significant? Will this rebellion against capitalization last?
Learning the grammatical rules of the English language has long been a burdensome, dreadful task for any student. I remember being in elementary school and learning to capitalize proper nouns (this still confuses me), titles, and of course, the first word of every sentence.
But on the internet, there’s a completely different set of (unwritten) rules. I first started spending a lot of time online in early middle school — mostly on Instagram, which had just begun to become really popular, in around 2012 and 2013 — and so did a lot of my classmates and friends. And we quickly adapted the all-lowercase style, maybe because it was a much-welcomed escape from the strict grammatical rules we had to follow in writing class, or maybe just because it was “cool.” But regardless of the reason, this cool, casual language style stuck.
And today, while you certainly won’t be ridiculed off the internet if you don’t use all-lowercase, it certainly is the cool thing to do. All my Instagram captions are in lowercase. My texts are in lowercase. One of my favorite brand Twitter accounts, @vitaminwater, is in all-lowercase. Even many song titles are now in all-lowercase.
Capitalization isn’t the only thing that young people have changed about language on the internet. I remember when instead of typing with exclamation marks, doing something like “!11!!1!” was popular. This has largely fallen out of fashion. Another method of expressing exaggeration or emotion, the keyboard smash, has recently been changed from…
