// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
cool kids are writing in all lowercase now. does that make you mad?
the worst person you know probably writes in all lowercase.
they’ll tell you it’s an aesthetic choice, a testament to informality. they’re likely a twentysomething brooklyn resident like myself, bullish on being not the voice of their generation but a voice of a generation, and definitely guilty of posting performative notes-app screenshots and pseudointellectual, stream-of-consciousness “musings” that compare charli xcx to the pope.
what are they really up to, and do they know they’re participating in a long, exclusive, exclusionary tradition? the stylistic choice to write in lowercase is a dead horse that’s been beaten, flogged, and beaten again—what my generation calls ran through. and yet, it’s having a moment. i had to investigate.
for one side of the internet, lowercase writing is feminine.
it’s a “formal feature of how girls engage online,” says rayne fisher-quann, who’s 25 and lives (where else?) in brooklyn. known to the web for the all-lowercase personal essays she writes for her blog internet princess, fisher-quann insists that the offhandedness of lowercase “neutralizes” the self-importance of writing about oneself. it’s a way, fisher-quann says, “to avoid criticism.”
her feelings trace back to the digital spaces she occupied in her adolescence. “i got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from early 2010s feminist tumblr,” fisher-quann tells me. a decade-plus ago, incisive microblogs were on the rise on the platform, alongside the now-canonical page justgirlythings. justgirlythings pioneered the art of superimposing an all-lowercase serif-font sentence on a desaturated image (usually of a young woman wearing an oversized jumper and a messy bun sitting by a fireplace). it mostly covered cozy clichés such as “rainy days” and “lazy sundays.” becky campos, the blog’s author, says she wrote justgirlythings “because it almost felt like you were reading more of my diary instead of some polished copy. it showed that i’m more of a real person than some corporation making the posts.”
then there was rupi kaur, the instapoet of my generation. kaur’s work investigated the less manicured parts of the female experience, also through a lack of capitalization, except her words weren’t accompanied by stock imagery—they were the image. this performance of accessible vulnerability, akin to a live-laugh-love pillow, was kryptonite for millennial women: in 2016, kaur’s debut collection, milk and honey, sold more copies than the next-best-selling work of poetry, the odyssey, by a factor of 10. in homer’s defense, he didn’t have instagram.
while kaur describes her fixation on lowercase as an “ode to my identity as a diasporic punjabi sikh woman” (gurmukhi script only has one case) and a way to channel “equalness,” the virality of her work cemented the supple curves of the lowercase alphabet as an expression of femininity during the early days of social media. and the story might end there, if the internet were only populated by women.
but, to burst my own algorithmic bubble: behind every justgirlythings fan is a 4chan power user.
“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.