Dustin M. Wax

writer, educator, anthropologist, and freelance thinker

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Why All the Capitalization Lately?

By: Dustin Tags:

 

I read a lot of other people's writing, in both my role as a teacher, grading papers students hand in, and as an editor at lifehack.org, preparing contributors' work for publication on the site. Lately, I've been noticing a strange phonemenon: the gratuitous Capitalization of random Words.

It's as if suddenly we've returned to the days of Pilgrim's Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts -- except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it's like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized -- except it's not Just nouns. In fact, I've searched in vain for a pattern, and can't find one.

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