the number of friends & family i’ve cut off for voting for kamala harris is zero. https://x.com/TiffanyFong_/status/1860005417063166403
This is obviously grammatically wrong. This people who do this seem to be young native speakers of English, as in this case. Is this a sort of slang-ish usage?
Summary: These are deliberate choices conveying certain complex social interactions, especially by young people. They are not ungrammatical, nor are they slang. They are also nothing new.
First, I’m afraid I’m going to have to issue a frame challenge here because the question has two conceptual errors in it that must be challenged.
As with spelling, capitalization cannot be “grammatically wrong” because it is about
writing, which is merely technology for encoding actual language, not
the language itself. In the same way, using cursive handwriting could never be considered “grammatically wrong”, nor could writing something using a purple pen. If it’s the same words in the same order, it has the same grammar. How it is written never affects its underlying grammar, which exists in the real language—the spoken one—not the encoding technology du jour.
Strictly speaking, “grammar” includes the twin
key components of syntax and morphology, and more broadly also phonology,
semantics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Grammar does not include
style conventions, register, politeness, nor any merely technological
matters such as a language’s orthography ᴀᴋᴀ its writing (ie:
alphabet & script, capitalization, spelling, hyphenation, punctuation)
or its typesetting (ie: font, slant, weight, symbols, glyph variants,
spacing, footnotes, super- & subscripts, colors & decorative ornaments).
Speech is primary; writing is merely secondary, a kind of technological reflection of the primary form of language. For more about this, please see An Introduction to Language by Victoria Fromkin and Grammar for English Language Teachers by Martin Parrott for common misconceptions about writing conventions versus grammatical correctness and various examples of errors in understanding that can arise by mistakenly including spelling as part of the language’s grammar.
“Slang” is part of the language’s lexis, here a restricted kind of vocabulary that’s a type of informal jargon specifically limited in use by time, place, domain, register, or context; it is not about “approved” choices of words or expressions. Using peepers to mean eyes or kisser to mean face is slang because it is using restricted, informal vocabulary, but saying Aincha got no more left? is not slang because there is no informal special vocabulary being used there.
While other definitions and characterizations of those terms can sometimes be found elsewhere, those that I have just now given above are the senses that I mean when I use these terms here.
Unicameral versions of the Latin alphabet have always existed, everything from the inscription chiselled into Trajan’s Column using only majuscules (here, Roman square capitals) all the way to the insular uncial book hand used in the gloriously illuminated Book of Kells.
Different written contexts in English sometimes require different choices in letter case. For example, a credit card will always show the cardholder’s name using only capital letters, while certain computer programming languages may require that some kinds of names for things be written using only uppercase in some situations but only lowercase in other situations. Telegrams were only transmitted in uppercase letters only. None of this is anything that could ever be considered ungrammatical.
The earlier answers that were miswritten as comments tell you why people may sometimes do this. Consider for example this user’s answer-in-comments:
Multiply the effort needed to move to and depress the shift key by the number of capital letters you would have to type in a day, and you've saved perhaps the energy in a few cereal flakes. Over the course of a year, that might save you a bowlful. This is energy conservation (or laziness) at its finest--not slang. // Rather than "wrong," I'd say it's a different style of typing--maybe "ugly" is a better word.
As well as this user’s answer-in-comments:
The lack of capital letters [represents] casual fast speech; very informal, ephemeral, and destined to last no longer than a month unless that person is a well-known celebrity. If this was for school work, the author would fix the errors of capitalisation in a flash, and if they didn't, they definitely would the next time when they see their assignment scored a C or D. On an added note, answering "why" questions is basically asking for guesses and opinions, which is off-topic. The responses might be interesting but how would you verify them?
I can personally attest to the fact that this particular all-lowercase style has been perfectly common in all casual computer communications, even since way back before the creation and general adoption of the Internet worldwide.
These cannot be considered ungrammatical, of course, since capitalization has nothing to do with the grammar. It is merely a deliberate stylist choice made by the typist, just as it was by the poet Edward Estlin Cummings.
A couple of academic researchers in this area are the linguists Dr Lauren Collister at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as Dr Lauren Fonteyn at the University of Manchester. Both study language use in informal digital contexts and the complex social dynamics we see driving evolving conventions there, including in particular this matter.
From the University of Manchester article cited above about Dr Fonteyn’s work titled “Millennials destroyed the rules of written English – and created something better”, we read:
Fonteyn says that on a superficial level, we can see millennials stripping anything unnecessary from their writing, like the removal of abbreviation markers in "dont," "cant," "im" and in acronyms like tf, ur, bc, idk, and lol. In a world where most of our conversations take place online, millennials are using a number of written devices to convey things that could typically only be communicated by cadence, volume, or even body language.
One such device is "atypical capitalisation," according to Fonteyn, a break from a rule prescribed by standard spelling, which states that capitalisation is "reserved for proper nouns, people, countries, brands, the first person pronoun, and the first word in a new sentence."
"What we see in millennial spelling is different, but not unruly," says Fonteyn. "Capitals are not necessarily used for people (we know who ed sheeran is, it’s Ed Sheeran), or initial words of a text or tweet."
And from Dr Callister in the cited Verge article titled “The way we text says a lot about our personality”, we read:
An interesting thing about texting and tweeting is that it’s an informal way of writing language down. It’s different from other forms like letters, contracts, receipts, or even email in some cases because those are a formal way of writing. So there are conventions: there’s an introductory line where you have to put a comma, you have to put the date in a specific place, you have to use a certain form of language that people generally perceive as very formal. If you don’t use the formal language, it gives maybe the wrong impression. If you use very casual language, if you use slang in a letter or a formal message written down, then it isn’t seen as proper, and we’re taught that in schools — in elementary school, and many of us have been learning this for years and years.
But when you get to text messaging or tweeting, there aren’t really rules for that that we’ve been taught. They are more informal. They are quick. They are intended to be more like those quickly written notes that you pass to your friends in class, or a quick note to yourself, a reminder of something that’s interesting that you might not have a formal way of writing these things down. Without those constraints of structure being very formal, then we have room to play. People can express themselves in a certain style in using different means of language that can show that they’re a little bit different than everybody else. They have their own way of writing, just as we have our own way of speaking to each other.
[...]
Just as when we speak, if we use certain words or phrases, it can indicate where we are from or where we grew up. Using periods or using proper capitalization can indicate that we are perhaps educated or that we are writers or that we are intellectuals or that we value a formal tone in some way. That says something about a person’s style and personality. That’s just another way of being able to express oneself in a kind of different way that might be slightly different from the people around you to be a little bit of an individual.
So these are deliberate choices conveying certain complex social interactions, especially by young people. But this style far antedates the Millennials, as it was common in electronic texts even before the Internet, and even in non-electronic ones like the graffiti found in the ancient city of Pompeii that was destroyed by a volcano in ᴀᴅ 79 nearly two millennia ago, making them an entirely different kind of “millennial”. :)
In many online venues and communities, typing in all lower case is not only not regarded as incorrect; it is the ordinary way to communicate, and a norm of sorts. Typing with completely standard conventions (such as capitalising the first letter of each word, always including apostrophes in words like "won't", etc.) would in these contexts potentially mark the user as an outsider, or as someone who doesn't know how to comport themselves according to the standards of the space. It is a deliberate stylistic choice to observe these nonstandard norms of English-language writing, or to flout them - the same as for the standard norms used in more formal writing.
In many cases, you can observe people speaking in these different ways within different communities on the same website or online venue. You might see the same person communicate according to standard norms of written English in one interaction, and then switch to the "casual lowercase norms" (for want of a better term) in another. It could be regarded as a sort of code switching.
Examples of online spaces where you might see this behaviour include in particular Twitter and other social media sites where people communicate to various audiences and for various purposes.
As to how the existence of these variant norms came about, I don't have the expertise to answer that, but I would suppose that it may have originated in contexts where people would tend to communicate very casually and/or hurriedly and that it became established as a set of conventions over long use.
Typing in only lower case (whether on desktop or mobile) is simply faster.
Contra the other answers, this is
Instead, typing in only lower case has been around since at least the 1990s with the rise of the internet.
In 1990s chatrooms (e.g. IRC), chat messengers (e.g. ICQ, MSN Messenger, AOL), in-game chats, etc., the default was always to type only in lower case. To bother to press shift or capslock to capitalize the first letter of a sentence was unusual.
Again, this wasn't some "young" person/"cool"/"slang" thing. It was simply that typing in lower case was faster. If there were autocorrect/autocapitalization then, most would probably have happily gone with it. But there wasn't, so they just typed in lower case.
Of course, in more formal contexts (such as when typing an email to a prospective employer), one would know to use proper capitalization.
Note that today, most mobile device (virtual) keyboards will autocapitalize the first letter of each sentence and also autocapitalize/autocorrect "I". So, today, sending an output message that is in all lower case is actually rarer than in the 1990s.
Observe that here, the quoted tweeter Tiffany Fong often tweets with standard capitalization:
The other answers fail to explain the above tweets. They claim that she is
So, why does she ever tweet with standard capitalization (and do so quite randomly and quite frequently)?
In contrast to the other answers, my answer (typing in only lower case is simply faster) explains the above tweets quite simply:
Cell/Smart Phones
Another possibility, in disagreement with the comment that lower case is suggestive of rapid speech, is that the contributor to X (formerly known as twitter or whatever) is using the minimum number of key taps to compose and send the post from a smart phone.
Typically they would have needed to swap to the numeric keyboard for the apostrophe and ampersand only, not tapping "I've" to auto capitalise "i've", and tapping send.
English capitalisation rules are not expressed in speech, aren't standard across languages, and their lack of application in a social media post is unlikely to impact comprehension of the text - particularly if read aloud in the head.
There are a few reasons:
LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I while ‘i’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER I; ‘Ⅴ’ is ROMAN NUMERAL FIVE; ‘5’ is DIGIT FIVE; ‘s’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER S while ‘ſ’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER LONG S and ‘ß’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER SHARP S but ‘ꞅ’ is LATIN SMALL LETTER INSULAR S — and so on and so forth. But you should probably also read up on the so-called ‘Arabic’ numerals.