I KNOW THIS THREAD HAS GONE ON A LONG TIME AND I MAY BEGIN TO SOUND TO PEOPLE LIKE A DEMENTED PERSON--BUT I AM *NOT* SHOUTING HERE! I JUST WANT TO CATCH YOUR EYE!

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

I KNOW THIS THREAD HAS GONE ON A LONG TIME AND I MAY BEGIN TO SOUND TO PEOPLE
LIKE A DEMENTED PERSON--BUT I AM *NOT* SHOUTING HERE! I JUST WANT TO CATCH
YOUR EYE!

In a message dated 9/9/2002 11:41:42 AM, JMB at STRADLEY.COM writes:

<<         I, for one, do find the text markings useful, and I think there is
plenty of evidence suggesting that most people do prefer text written
primarily in lower case.  For example, almost all text, including that used
on this list, is primarily in lower case, even though it would be easier on
the writer to choose upper case and stick to it.  I'm aware that I haven't
presented rigorous evidence for lower case's greater ease of reading, but
that's been my own experience and a number of other people have said the
same.  Doubtless the popularity and ease of reading are primarily for the
reasons you suggest. >>

My basic point was just to respond to the fact that MM began his original
message with, "Please don't shout!" when it was obvious that the caps in the
message he was responding to were not intended to convey a shout. I think it
is almost certainly the case that, if we look through a representative sample
of the thousands of examples that Michael Quinion found of "caps" and "shout"
in the same message, we will find that rarely do people actually USE caps to
indicate "shouting"--the USE almost always has some other purpose (or is
simply an accident). This seems, for example, to be the case with the example
that Michael Quinion quotes. Thus to say that usage indicates that all caps
generally means "shouting" would seem to be contradicted by the empirical
data. OF COURSE there exists a general rule that a lot of people believe in
that holds that caps should be reserved only for shouting--even though almost
nobody ever does it. But this strikes me as an absurd prescriptivist rule,
given that it effectively prohibits the use of all-caps for whatever reason.
And the fact that Michael Quinion found over 22,000 cases in which people
were apparently trying to enforce the prescriptivist rule suggests to me that
there are 22,000 messages in which the authors did not know about or abide by
the prescriptivist rule, either.

So what good is a rule that tells us how to shout when we rarely want to
shout--except to allow more "sophisticated" people to show how sophisticated
they are by berating newcomers about their lack of knowledge of a useless
rule?

Whether or not in general people don't "like" messages sent all in caps is a
different issue from whether or not messages sent all in caps are truly more
difficult to read, or whether or not people find them inherently
"aggressive." The fact that there is a lot of received wisdom out there does
not make it right.