I take less umbrage with the particular fruits of her speculation than with her frail defense of the inquiry into that “something.” If it’s “impossible” to know the historical effects, that’s because historical causes are difficult to tease out. But there are other, as you point out, interesting and valid lines of inquiry than simply the historical.

I like to think that those who do not capitalize this pronoun, such as the youth, show an improper regard for their own dignity. Even though I can be lazy sometimes while using chat clients, I tend to reach for the shift key in that context. It’s partly for the same reasons of clarity that supposedly led to the shift. But it’s partly from a certain self regard.

The article doesn’t specify, but do other languages have a single-letter first person singular pronoun? Plenty of languages have single-letter words (like English) that haven’t capitalized them. The word “y” would be a pain to capitalize in Spanish, as would “w” in Polish (I don’t know what that one means). Those graphical problems seem less troubling than “i.”

Wait, I’m a bit confused. Did Caroline Winter write the part that you site in bold (“So what effect… something to it all”) or is she quoting someone else, and did she or you write the following paragraph (“Such silliness… ala Plato”)? And why do the readers of Monadology care whether William Safire is on vacation?

I think this psychologizing is silly. I suspect a much more likely explanation for the capitalized “I” is English grammar. We capitalize the first letter of all our sentences. Since the English proposition goes subject-verb-object, when we say “I” it very frequently goes at the beginning of the sentence, more often than “you”, since we all talk about ourselves more often than about others. (Note also that the accusative form “me” is not capitalized, and also that it pretty much never comes at the beginning of a sentence.) Then we get used to capitalizing it. I have no evidence for this other than a hunch, but I think it’s much more likely than that it’s caused by or causes selfishness, [joke] which, as everyone knows, was invented by Descartes. [/joke]

but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot

It’s unclear to me whether this is meant to actually mean something. Why is the dot sweet and what does it provide? Is there any phenomenological difference between thinking of myself as “I”, as “i”, or as “ego”? I’m tempted to make up an equally ludicrous “insight” about German, which capitalizes all its nouns, or to earlier English, which capitalized substantives almost at random, or to ancient Latin, which had no lower-case letters. I’m tempted to point out that “capital” means “Of words and letters: Standing at the head of a page, or at the beginning of a line or paragraph, initial; Capital letters: letters of the form and relative size used in this position” [OED], and that these orthographical conventions have obvious non-psychological explanations. I’m tempted to point out that English usage tends to be standardized by authorities lacking the power of, say, the academie francaise, and so tends to be odd and inconsistent.

We need to reacquaint ourselves with the merits of explicitly false etymologies, ala Plato.

What are these merits? And what do you mean by “explicit”? It’s not clear to me that Plato himself took them to be false, and other ancient writers who followed his lead (e.g. Isidore of Seville) certainly didn’t. When the medievals said that “stone” (lapis) is so called because it hurts the foot (laesum pedis), they didn’t think they were being poetic, they thought they were being scientific. They were bad philologists, but they were trying to be good ones, not to be poets. Why return to their methods if we no longer share their aims?

Sorry for the incoherent rant. I must be feeling irritable.

Rebekah, the bold passages with the lines on the right are the quoted passages, presumbly from the article Nate linked to. Visually, I’ve never considered this the most clear way to quote from another work. Do other Monadology readers also frequent William Safire’s New York Times column on language? I guess so, though I’m not one of them. The jab about Safire “clearly” being on vacation seems rather petty. Should the column be suspended when he’s not producing it?

It’s not particularly edifying to quote at length from someone else’s writing, then proceed to provide a brief, superficial criticism of that writing. But I also expect that anyone who has ever kept a blog has been guilty of such a gaffe. And that said, I spent the bulk of last night amassing nearly 50 comments to two facebook posts about Star Trek YouTube videos, which is not even remotely edifying, so take my perception as simply a response rather than a criticism.

Michael,

The article quotes essentially the same argument you make about how the capitalization came about, although it doesn’t make explicit the subject, verb, object element. (I alluded to it as the “same reasons of clarity that supposedly led to the shift.”)

Why shouldn’t you make arguments about what it means to capitalize certain words or parts of speech and not others? Were writers of earlier English really capitalizing at random, and if so, how do you know this? It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb that if people do something, whether according to a rule or not, they intend something by it. Certainly reading Austen and O’Brian leads one to believe that some spellers back then imbued their orthographic choices with great import. Doesn’t it mean Something to capitalize Posterity rather than not?

Extending your argument makes it even harder for me to agree. Would you deny that speaking a certain language affects one’s habits and character? It seems to me that speaking Italian, with those few but beautiful vowels, those extra languid syllables, says something different about a soul than speaking English. It’s hard to see how writing a language, with similar rules to be followed, doesn’t subtly affect one’s soul, too. Our making may not cause our souls to be something they were not already (in potentiality), but what we make and how we make it does reflect and embody what our souls contained. This seems true of poetry, and I have a hard time saying it’s not true of vowel sounds, vocabulary, and even orthography.

Amanda,

I’ve never been a big Safire fan myself, mostly because of his unsavory connections, and have almost never read the column. Petty? Or just snarky?

hb,

I would concede a lot of what you say, but not all. Language and language usage does say something about our souls, and how we talk shapes how we think as well as vice versa. Nevertheless, the idea that the capitalization or otherwise of a pronoun could make such a profound difference as is suggested here remains absurd.

Were writers of earlier English really capitalizing at random, and if so, how do you know this? It seems like a pretty good rule of thumb that if people do something, whether according to a rule or not, they intend something by it.

All I can say is, one has to read a lot of it to get a sense of when something is deeply significant and when it’s random. For a long time spelling and orthography were extremely fluid, and variations indicated only how something sounded to a particular scribe (not author, or not only; see e.g. the wide variations in spelling in Chaucer manuscripts) at the moment he wrote it. The next time he wrote the same word he might do it differently. This doesn’t mean that there was no intention behind a scribe’s choices, but that such choices were unlikely to be a product of a deep systemic fact about the English soul.

Certainly reading Austen and O’Brian leads one to believe that some spellers back then imbued their orthographic choices with great import.

I’m talking about writers much earlier than the Georgians.

How about this: the Germans capitalize much more than we do, and the French much less. Does this bespeak some profound difference in their characters? Or can it be explained much more simply?

Not to say that there are not great differences in national psyches, just that these sorts of things seem very poor markers to me.

That being said, I can’t help often being disturbed by modern editors’ tendency to paragraph, punctuate, and spell old texts of whatever language according to modern conventions. I’d like to read things as they were written, not as an editor thinks they should be read. I hate modernized editions of Shakespeare or Malory. On the other hand, how far does one take this? Should Vergil be printed as close to the 7th and 8th century (I believe that’s about as early as they come) manuscripts’ usage as we can? Or according to the best scholarly reconstruction/speculation about how it must have been written in the 1st century? Or do we bite the bullet and admit that even with capitalization, punctuation, word spacing, and so forth, we’re still reading the authentic text of the Aeneid?

Not much time, but do want to respond.

On the question of national psyches: agreed, there are better and easier ways to examine them. I have no idea what difference German’s capitalization would make or indicate about the national character of Germany. Can’t say there isn’t a difference indicated, but I know nothing about how to approach it.

Glad we agree on most of the elements. Am I reading you correctly to say your problem is mostly with the extrapolation from the effects/meaning/thing indicated of different linguistic or even orthographic choices in individuals (such as individual scribes), which you seem to admit, to the national level? I see how that exercise is pretty infirm. For myself, it’s the leap into history that makes the inquiry most problematic: 1) there’s so much else that goes into a national psyche; and 2) how do we even approach the question that you posed.

I wouldn’t want to posit a profound difference on that level. I did want, however, to defend the possibility that there indeed might be a “phenomenological difference between thinking of myself as ‘I’, as ‘i’, or as ‘ego,’ although I admit I have little to say about that particular question at the moment. As I understand you, though, you’re not foreclosing that possibility.

Also, thanks for that old post on the Johnny Chair. We need to improve that page’s Google rank.

The thing that bothered me about that article is that there is a tradition of uncapitalized “i” in literature and poetry, the history of which I am uncertain of, and would have liked to have seen. Alas.