Rules and Common Sense

It's like I used to tell the kids on my school bus: "Rules are supposed to be based on common sense. If you have common sense, you don't really need rules and, if you don't have common sense, all the rules in the world aren't going to do you any good." Don't feel bad if you don't understand that, I don't think any of the kids did either. I don't think that they really cared about being right, all they cared about was finding some loophole in the rules so they could get away with something. I remember one middle school girl who asked me for some special privilege, I don't even remember what it was. I told her that, if I let her do it, I'd have to let everybody do it, which would cause problems on the bus. She said, "I'm not asking you to let everybody do it, I'm just asking you to let me do it."

I think the rules of grammar were originally based on common sense and, when they don't make sense anymore, they eventually get changed. The one that immediately comes to mind is about prepositions, you know, the words that you were not supposed to end a sentence with. Some time ago, I read in the paper that rule had been rescinded in the latest edition of he dictionary. The reason they gave for the change was that, to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, it was sometimes necessary to resort to clumsy wording like, "That's the place to which I am going." instead of "That's the place I am going to." Truth be known, most people had been using the second form for some time in casual conversation, the dictionary people just made it official.

I think the purpose of teaching standardized grammar and spelling in school is so that, anywhere you go in the English speaking world, you can communicate effectively and be easily understood by he locals. Regional dialects are not nearly as diverse as they once were, but various subcultures are still coming up with their own mannerisms of speech all the time. The longer a group is together, and the more isolated they become from other groups, the more their speech patterns tend to evolve into their own private dialect. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they can still communicate with people outside their group. School English is supposed to give us the ability to do that.

As you have pointed out before, written language is not the same as the spoken word. In oral conversation, nobody knows whether or not you are following the rules of capitalization. I think the current trend among young people and, apparently, not so young people, to dispense with capitalization altogether originated with the internet chat rooms. Come to think of it, I don't know if they even have those anymore, but the same principle should apply to text messaging. What you have here is something that's between a phone call and a written letter. The rapid back and forth exchange is like an oral conversation, yet it's done with typing keys. As you mentioned, when you hit the shift key, it doesn't always work, so you have to go back and correct the error. This can be frustrating if you're texting in real time, but it shouldn't matter when you're posting a message that is going to be read hours, or even days, later. Indeed, one of the things I like about blogging and forum discussion is that you get to think about what you want to say, read it over, and edit it if necessary before you post it.

Bottom line is that I don't really care if you capitalize or not, but I intend to keep doing it myself. In 50 years or so, if capitalization has been totally abandoned by the general population, I may consider going with the flow. I am not the kind of guy who embraces every new thing that comes down the pike, I prefer to wait and see if it's going to last or not. It's like when I got my first computer in 2001. I figured that, since we were well into the 21st Century, it was high time that I caught up with the 20th.