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The Sunday Magazine

UPPER CASE v. lower case - Michael's essay

Up until the appearance a few years ago of the Lowercase Brewery in Seattle, the most talked about initialization in the arts was that of Edward Estlin Cummings. The man wrote more than 2,900 poems, but he is best known today for his lower case initials. He is universally known as Lowercase e Lowercase e Lowercase c cummings. But that was his publisher's idea.
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(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

The gnomes who monitor the orthographic desk at The Sunday Edition worked into the wee hours this week wrestling with this question: to go lower or stay upper. Orthography, as you well know, is the study of the methodology of writing a language. And it's far more complicated than you might think.

Letter case, the distinction between upper and lower, is not a straightforward proposition. For example, the majuscule or upper case generally has the same height, one letter to the other. A famous example of majuscule texts, perhaps the most famous, is the illustrated Book of Kells. On the other hand the minuscule, or lower case, can have letters of different height; these are called ascenders and descenders.

There is an old and storied history, especially in literature, of coming to grips with letter case. Don Marquis was a popular columnist with the long dead New York Evening Sun. Stuck for an idea one day in 1916, Marquis wrote a story about a brave cockroach. The cockroach's name was Archy. His best friend was an alley cat named Mehitabel.

Archy wanted to be a writer and used  an old typewriter. But because he was so small he could never hit the shift key to capitalize as he was typing. He had to jump from key to key. Therefore he was always spelled as the lower case archy. Except when Marquis wrote about the cockroach and the cat in a narrative, he used the upper case A for Archy. Marquis, of course, could hit the shift key and type at the same time.

Up until the appearance a few years ago of the Lowercase Brewery in Seattle, the most talked about initialization in the arts was that of Edward Estlin Cummings. The man wrote more than 2,900 poems, but he is best known today for his lower case initials. He is universally known as Lowercase e Lowercase e Lowercase c cummings. But that was his publisher`s idea. Edward Estlin himself started out writing his poetry under Uppercase E Uppercase E Uppercase C Cummings.

Initials are not to be trifled with. Some people are famous with only their initials - the writers A.A. Milne, and W.O. Mitchell, the Canadian actor R.H. Thompson, the Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle - though with that last name, initials don't help. Some companies we recognize primarily by their initials -  RCA, MGM, IBM.

Ever alert to changing grammatical mores, we live by the rule: capitalization where necessary but not necessarily capitalization. And all the while, we take care, minding our p's and especially, our q's.
    

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