If you’ve read anything i’ve written in the past four years1, you’ve likely noticed that i use a lowercase ‘i’ for the English singular first-person pronoun. I’ve often been curious how people perceive this habit — does it seem lazy? Cringey? Interesting? Like i’m trying too hard to fit in with the #kidsthesedays? Maybe it’s confusing that i leave that one word lowercase while capitalising all the other normally-capitalised English words (proper nouns, starts of sentences, etc). Or maybe most people don’t notice it at all, and those who do don’t really care about the reasoning behind it.
Even so, in the interest of being shamelessly self-indulgent, i’m going to presume that there’s at least one person out there who’s curious about this whole lowercase ‘i’ business. This post is for them2.
It all started on an sunny autumnal day in late September, 2018. I was taking the train from London to Cambridge for some sort of orientation event, and my mind started meandering on an idle wander (as minds on trains are wont to do). Suddenly, a curious thought occurred to me: why does English capitalise precisely one pronoun, and leave the rest as ordinary words? Other languages in the Roman alphabet are perfectly content to have lowercase first-person pronouns, like the Spanish ‘yo’ and the German ‘ich’.3 Why should English be any different? And more importantly, does capitalising my own pronoun (and no one else’s) prime my subconscious to think i’m more important than other people?
The thought lit a fire in me. “I’m gonna try and change this! I need to follow Gandhi’s advice and be the change i want to see in the world,” i thought, already using the lowercase ‘i’ convention in the transcript of my inner monologue. “But first, i’m gonna tweet about it.”
Gonna try to stop capitalising the pronoun "i" anywhere a different pronoun (like "we" or "you") wouldn't be capitalised. Elevating only the pronoun that refers to me and me alone just feels weirdly egocentric 🤔 #showerthoughts
And with that, i made the switch. I’ve never looked back.
In the years since that fateful September day, it’s been interesting to observe the psychological knock-on effects that have followed my adoption of a lowercase pronoun. It sadly hasn’t done much to damper my American-bred egocentrism, at least not consciously or directly. But because being smart has long been a core part of my sense of identity, and the use of ‘improper' grammar is regarded by many as a sign of low intelligence, committing to this divergent orthography has proven to be a vulnerable act in and of itself. “If smart people see me using this little ‘i’,” the insecure parts of me wonder, “will they think i’m stupid?” The good news is, even if they do, that disdainful opinion hasn’t created any noticeable detriment in my life. And that realisation alone — that some people might regard me as unintelligent, and my quality of life hasn’t suffered at all as a result — has proven to be a boon in its own right.
A more interesting side effect of this change has been the way it’s opened me up to higher playfulness in syntax, punctuation, and other elements of grammar. Growing up, i understood grammar and spelling as a set of rigid, righteous rules, handed down to us here in the present through centuries of preservation and refinement. Good grammar was good, bad grammar was bad, and there was a direct correlation between the accuracy of your grammar and the value of your thoughts. Unsurprisingly, this imbued me with a certain arrogant “kids these days” mentality regarding anyone whose grammar deviated from codified conventions4.
I now understand grammar (along with spelling, definition, and just about any other element of language) as being descriptive rather than prescriptive, a description of how language is rather than a prescription of what it ought to be. A dictionary isn’t the source of word meanings, nor is it the birthplace of new words; instead, new words (and new meanings for existing words5) arise organically in the populace, and once their recognition becomes sufficiently widespread and stable, their definitions are recorded in the dictionary. It’s the same way with grammar. English wasn’t invented at a particular point in history, with all its rules and structures mapped out with careful forethought. As anyone who’s learned English as a second language can tell you, its present structure clearly emerged from a process of random, chaotic evolution, characterised more by exceptions than by rules and respecting no firm connection between pronunication and spelling6. In other words: everything’s made up, and the points don’t matter. Grammar rules like “always capitalise the first-person singular pronoun” are a completely different animal than ethical rules like “don’t steal snacks from 7-11”, which suggests that we might need different terms for descriptive rules (“we humans have noticed a pattern that generally holds”) and prescriptive rules (“we humans have decided that this is the right way to be a good person”) to avoid confusing the two. But that’s a rabbit hole for another time.
The actual point i’m trying to make here is, there’s nothing wrong with deciding not to follow the ‘rules’ (read: conventions) of English grammar. Using a lowercase ‘i’ isn’t bad, it’s merely unconventional. And it’s thought-provoking as a direct consequence of its strangeness. At the end of the day, the purpose of language is communication, and my view is that good language is defined purely by how effectively people can use it to communicate and understand each other. Sometimes that means following a consistent set of structural rules, so that each participant in a conversation can get approximately the same mental representations from a given sentence. Other times, it means deliberately breaking those rules to convey a message through indirect means. The message might be a reminder that our cultural and linguistic context is constructed and ever-evolving, rather than universal and set in stone. It might be a verbal equivalent of grabbing someone by the shoulders and shaking them a bit to get their full attention.7 It could be a simple nudge to the effect of, "hey, things could be different," or, "you can create more of your reality than you realise."
Whatever the reason behind it, i’ve gotten a great deal of joy from this little act of linguistic rebellion, and i don’t see myself returning to conventional capitalisation in my personal correspondence any time soon.8 And while it might not be a movement yet, i've discovered that i'm not alone in this choice of personal pronoun, which has me excitedly curious for what the future of English might have in store.
Or have been graced with an SMS message from yours truly.
And also for me.
Although, as this Sporcle post points out, the German language does capitalise the formal second-person pronoun. (I’d argue that it’s more sensible to capitalise an expressly formal pronoun than to universally capitalise that of the speaker, irrespective of their deserved level of formality. But maybe that’s just a post hoc justification for continuing to believe the thing i was going to believe anyway.)
Needless to say, my appreciation and respect for forms of English that differed from my own (such as Indian English, AAVE, and even British English) wasn’t exactly through the roof back then.
As a particularly illustrative example, consider the pronunciation of -ough words like ‘tough’, ‘trough’, ‘through’, ‘though’, ‘thought’, ‘dough’, and ‘plough’. Hardly rhyming couplet material, despite the pronounced family resemblance (no pun intended).
After all, many would argue that a defining characteristic of good art is that it makes us uncomfortable, and violating grammatical/syntactical conventions can certainly have that effect.
Admittedly, i still haven’t made the switch in my professional correspondence, because the stakes around being perceived as mature/intelligent/professional are (or at least feel) considerably higher there. I’m thoroughly fond of this quirk in my personal writing style, but it’s not a hill i’m prepared to die on just yet.