Why This Hatred For The Shift Key?
You’ve probably seen it — heck, you’ve probably done it yourself, many times. Almost everywhere you go online, if comments are available, or if there’s any kind of open forum, you will see these posts:
this is my opinion: i think [X] should be [Y], [Z]
Now, I’m very specifically not trying to draw attention to the content of the post, because some number of them are very decent, and the rest are mostly ignorable. No, what I’m specifically looking at is the writer’s apparent hatred for the Shift key on his keyboard. With the exception of the [X], [Y] and [Z] I used as placeholders, that post has no uppercase characters whatsoever.
So, my question is, why? Usually, the answer I get is “its extra effort to use the shit^Hft key, and im too lazy”. I don’t buy that. I’m possibly the laziest person I know, and to me, it’s harder not to use the Shift key. It actually takes more mental effort to write like that than it does to write with proper capitalization, punctuation, and spelling (typos notwithstanding). And I’m sure my readers (all two of you) appreciate it.
So why do we see so little capitalization? What is the hatred for the Shift key? Are we moving towards an e. e. cummings-style Internet, where the Shift key is banned, or limited only to articles on media websites like CNN.com? Same for the apostrophe, and (in extreme cases), the period. What’s going on here?
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mst b all the txtin teh kids do these days
No, seriously, have you noticed how most cellular phones don’t have a proper SHIFT key? Just some kind of functionally crippled CAPS LOCK?
As a side note: your mastery of written English is admirable, at least to my non-native eyes. I’m always in awe when I see this in a fellow Romanian.
I’m tempted to agree with that, but I think the anti-Shift movement is older than ubiquitous cellphones. I suspect it’s really as old as AOL’s connection to the Internet, if not older than that, even.
And re: your side note, I’ve been told my English (both written and spoken) is good, but to be honest, it’s only just ‘adequate’ to me. But then, I love the language, so maybe I make up for that with passion, yeah?