“i’m willing to believe that [using lowercase] is more deliberately aestheticized among young women on tumblr,” says adam aleksic, an internet linguist who goes by etymologynerd, “but none of the mega online communities use regular punctuation.” he and i are talking at a swanky coffee shop in soho, where he’s finishing up research on why the r-word is making a comeback.
to make his point, etymologynerd pulls up 4chan on his phone and starts scrolling. among the rancid all-lowercase musings, i notice a plethora of greater-than signs, angle brackets, and asterisks. because 4chan doesn’t support—has never supported—rich text (italicization, bolding, etc.), users also employ text-markup conventions: *yes* for yes, /i/hell no/i/ as hell no, etc.
while many may contend that writing in lowercase is a callback to one’s youth, sites like 4chan remind us that, at least within the digital sphere, the callback goes back much further and is part of a larger tradition. “lower case? it started with single-case tty model 33. now, it is habit,” ken thompson writes, in lowercase, in an email where he politely declines my request for an interview. (notice how thompson spells lower case as two words instead of one. before lowercase was a cornerstone of identity politics, it was just a lower case of the alphabet.)
ken thompson is 83 years old and, of course, one of the computer scientists to whom we owe the existence of the internet. he’s referring, in his email, to the teletype model 33, a popular terminal used for telecommunications that debuted in 1963. back in the ’50s, computers functioned on terminals that could support only 64 unique characters that—counting numbers, punctuation, and special characters—left no room for lowercase letters. this meant that most early programming languages (fortran, pascal, lisp) were written exclusively in uppercase. it was only between the ’60s and ’70s, when hardware manufacturing started to mature and memory costs started to plummet, that more characters became possible.