capital punishment
Sean Draine (seandr@Exchange.Microsoft.com)
Wed, 10 Mar 1999 11:12:22 -0800
Warning: The message below was written using an elaborate and diabolical
encryption scheme. See the footnote* for instructions on how to decipher the
code!
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writing all lowercase messages is an email phenomenon that's been around for
quite a while. why does email lend itself to lowercase? in addition to the
reasons mentioned by others, consider that
a) email is based on computers, and computers have forced millions of
untrained typists to use keyboards. for the typing hack, repeatedly
stretching the poor pinky finger over to the shift key is a tedious, often
painful excercise. some doctors even consider it unhealthy.
b) historically, email has been the domain of engineers, who tend to be
sticklers for efficiency. anyone with any knowledge of information theory
can tell you that the information conveyed by uppercase letters is entirely
redundant with that communicated by semantic, syntactic, punctuational, and
other cues. energy spent on capitalization is energy wasted. given that the
information market loves efficiency, we can expect uppercase letters to
vanish altogether in the future!
so, all this ranting about uppercase letters amounts to little more than a
peculiar form of sadism that stands in the way of progress.
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* To decode this message, change the first letter of each sentence, as well
as any proper nouns, to uppercase.