tHe laNGuaGe Pol!cE.
(an essay on lowercase writing, intention and being utterly exhausted by the syntax warriors)
hey, you. i’ve been listening to Rose Gray so much, i could recite the exact moment a firecracking synth shows up in any of her songs. if you’re in an RnB/Soledad mood, i’d also suggest Vicariously by Anthony Ramos and 20201127 by Mac DeMarco.
general update: February has been strange. it feels like i’m going to hit the ceiling soon and land head first, right where i need to be. the exhaustion is slightly deafening but it will pass, as all things do. with that, i bid you farewell and pray you find small comforts for the rest of this month.
thank you for being here <3
who ever thought that we would be sitting here today, talking about language policing on Substack, an app whose users appear to glorify writing liberally? me, i thought so. the forewarning that imperialism would eventually sneak its trifling head into language rules was something that we had been exposed to rather early on in life. when i say early, i mean the 1800s early. now we are watching, and i must be frank, ‘highly esteemed’ writers, tell us how and when to use letter case and that if we do not use it the way they want us to, it will give them a big humongous headache and they will be irritated forever and ever. i think you can tell how bizarre this is to me and several others who have encountered this conversation online. this feels like our version of a court hearing: The Colony vs. Lowercase Writers.
what irks me about this ongoing debate is how divisive the anti-lowercase arguments truly are. as writers, we have something of a moral responsibility to practice what we preach. i say this with confidence, because we are in fact, preaching about the power of language, of intentionality in tone, application and message and most notably, of letting stories be told as the writer feels called to tell them. as a starting point, i think it is important to define cultural hegemony. in his prison notebooks, Gramsci defined cultural hegemony as ‘the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who shape the culture of that society- the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values and more- so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm’ (1929-1932).
why am i bringing cultural hegemony up? well, my friend, English is one of the main languages (alongside economics) of imperial power. it was and continues to be a language used to disenfranchise anyone from a non-European/ Western country who does not speak it. we tend to glaze over the fact that this language, as beautiful and fascinating as it is, was used as a weapon to reinforce systemic issues throughout our ancient and modern world. there is a strange surge of power that comes from being able to write in English, that many writers, scholars and just about anyone else, may not be willing to acknowledge fully.
what does this have to do with lowercase writing though? let me highlight the first and likely most necessary point: in practising this form of cultural hegemony, feeding into this urge to defend traditionalism in how we write in English and insisting that we maintain its literary rules, a sort of desire for control becomes apparent. this desire stems from said hegemony; the subconscious need to uphold imperialism in ways that many of us are not cognisant of, as we write and critique other people’s writing. this isn’t to say that we are not allowed to pass criticisms, but it’s rather telling when you frame them in such a way that seeks to uphold traditionalism and control but makes it seem like it’s coming from a place of ‘wanting better’ for the global literary community. the insistence on this idea of ‘proper’ capitalisation isn’t just about aesthetics or readability. it is an extension of this cultural hegemony, a way of maintaining the status quo in language, which has long been a tool of imperial control.
something worth noting is that this app and the literary niche of the internet at large, has publications written primarily in English, even though many of its writers aren’t even native speakers. the more i think about what the issue with writing in lowercase is, the more unsettling it is to me that people who hold such vivid imaginations and thoughtful worldviews, cannot bring themselves to embrace the true evolution of language and agency in writing approaches. this goes without saying that you can dislike something, but why you don’t like that thing matters, even if you think it isn’t all that serious. the ‘why’ says a lot more about how you’re thinking about language and the ways that people employ it to tell a story. i think in that sense, i worry about language policing (as it relates to writing styles) quite a bit. this isn’t just about Substack- language policing has long dictated who is deemed ‘intelligent’ or ‘credible’. from academic gatekeeping to job interviews, non-standard English is frequently met with condescension or exclusion.
as someone who is writing a full-time research dissertation, i am well aware of how to cross my t’s and dot my i’s. but i feel called to lowercase when i write these personal essays because it speaks to a part of me that feels like a whisper in the void. never yelling, always a sharp breath at one’s ear. i think about Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and Gloria Anzaldǔa, who actively worked to dismantle language policing, right down to the ways we choose to use punctuation and letter case. i am reminded of my heritage as a South African woman, who is surrounded by eleven official languages, of which i understand a handful of them. most of which, do not conform to the standard of English literary rules, despite sharing the extended Latin alphabet in certain cases. to further drive this point, many Nguni languages like isiZulu and isiXhosa do not emphasise capitalisation in the same rigid ways as English. an example of this in isiZulu is how sentence structure and meaning are reliant on prefixes and tonal shifts more than capital letters, to indicate importance.
with this in mind, i truly do write in lowercase to pay homage to the cultures that have served and fed into my creative and emotional ecosystem. to Nguni languages, to bell hooks and her radical defiance, to Angela Davis and even my father, who, since childhood, has capitalised all his words when writing anything. i am simply not interested in maintaining literary rules that have a contextual history of oppression, things that are often subverted in our communal love for the English language. i am actively deconstructing these subtle imperial nodes lodged in my brain, despite how fluent and precise my command of the language might be. there is no ‘normal’ in writing. and it makes me want to be defiant when people who claim to be open-minded about language, are so easily swayed into unrelenting tradionalism, particularly with a language that has impacted the world so deeply.
there seems to be this speculative tone about people who write in lowercase- that we are trying too hard to be ‘aesthetic’, that we cannot write at all, that we feel unworthy and are trying to compensate with writing like we’re in some indie film. here is me being speculative for a moment: these criticisms lack nuance and empathy and intentionally so. i’m also bothered by the idea that writing poorly should be associated with shame. ‘ i am ashamed that i cannot write like Robert Frost, so i will cover it with lowercase letters and make it look pretty’. that is so extremely condescending, but it is also something i have seen in the comments passed by writers about their disdain for lowercase writing.
the irony is that many of us will tell people to write and create even if the work is bad, but when the time comes, you undress people and find ways of planting both a culture of shame in writing and adding your dislike for something as if those things are even partially related to one another. of course, there will always be an essay written by someone that isn’t the best, and they may have written it in lowercase, but it isn’t their choice of lowercase lettering that was at fault and it’s just as obvious as someone writing with standard letter case and still not doing all that well.
i would like to end with this: Ha-Joon Chang described economics as having ‘become a bit like Catholic theology in medieval Europe’. he was expressing how economics became the language of rulers and therefore, of power and as a sign of intellect. in the same vane, and as i mentioned with cultural hegemony, we are aware of the language that has dominion over Substack right now. and that’s fine, it is what it is. this is not an ‘i hate English’ essay. however, it is so crucial that we recognise behaviours and practices that isolate others and make writing even more inaccessible than it already is.
truthfully, you might be robbing yourself of the experience of meeting someone intimately when you disregard other forms of writing like this. yes, there is power in understanding how these rules work, but there is also power in disengaging with them. there is a confidence and ecstasy that rushes through you when you say fuck it! and write as your hand is telling you to. i would be so extremely bored in a world where no one is brave enough to go against the grain, no matter how small or large the movement is. wHen yOu cOntOrt lAnguAgE, it has a way of building imaginative worlds that could transfer into reality and hopefully, introduce perspective into conversations that previously lacked it.
let the kids write man.
yours,
Thando. x