Well, yes, it does. My title seems so urgent because it's written in all caps. So there.
Alright, I must confess, I've been a pretentious ass about capitalization recently. And probably not in the way you might expect.
First, a little background:
I used to capitalize, like, religiously. Back before we all had smart-phones and tricorders, back when to text someone you had to painstakingly tap out the words with the telephone keypad, I still capitalized religiously, and constantly used proper grammar. I would do stuff like put semicolons between two separate but related clauses; I would use words like 'whom' and phrases like 'in which case.'
Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating, but you get the point. I was being a pretentious ass. That's no way to talk to your friends! Well, I eventually got the point, and learned to be more casual with mah palls. Eventually, i wasn't even capitalizing everything i wrote in my text messages and emails!
sometimes, when i posted things on facebook, i didn't even worry about capitalization there either!
Once, my girlfriend made fun of me for writing like a 13-year-old in my emails and various other digital communiques. And I got to thinking: why had I made a proverbial 180-degree turn? Well, I rationalized, google doesn't care if you capitalize anything. Hell, their brand, "google," isn't even capitalized! Searching the internet isn't case-sensitive, I can't be bothered to capitalize all the comments I make on all the bullshit I care about! And besides, no one likes a douche right? I groan every time I hear someone complaining about the misuse of some-such word or the improper use of, like, the serial comma. (Seriously, I have a friend on facebook who wrote a status decrying people who have stopped using the serial comma correctly).
So, I thought to myself every time I intentionally emailed someone without the proper capitalization, "I'm rebelling, man. I'm rebelling against the oppression of a syntactical CONVENTION, don't you see?!" And in my rebellion, I thought, I was eliciting some sort of greater awareness of... something. My petit-pretentiousness, I guess.
In all this thinking about capitalization, I was forgetting the most important thing any author - or writer of words, really - must consider. His audience. It doesn't matter that I thought all this crazy carp about the meaning of my lack of capitalization. All that matters is how it's going to be read. And I'm probably not going to annoy anyone by using proper grammar.
So, from now on, I'm going to try to use proper capitalization whenever I can.
except when i'm feeling lazy.
