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酷小孩现在都用全小写字母写作。这让你抓狂吗？

Save this storySave this storythe worst person you know probably writes in all lowercase.they’ll tell you it’s an aesthetic choice, a testament to informality. they’re likely a twentysomething brooklyn resident like myself, bullish on being not the voice of their generation but a voice of a generation, and definitely guilty of posting performative notes-app screenshots and pseudointellectual, stream-of-consciousness “musings” that compare charli xcx to the pope.

你认识的最糟糕的人可能就是用全小写字母写作的。他们会告诉你这是一种审美选择，是随性的一种证明。他们很可能像我一样，是个住在布鲁克林的二十多岁年轻人，热衷于成为“一代人的声音”而非“这一代人的代言人”，并且绝对有罪于发布那些表演性质的备忘录截图，以及将 Charli XCX 与教皇相提并论的伪知识分子式意识流“沉思”。

what are they really up to, and do they know they’re participating in a long, exclusive, exclusionary tradition? the stylistic choice to write in lowercase is a dead horse that’s been beaten, flogged, and beaten again—what my generation calls ran through. and yet, it’s having a moment. i had to investigate.

他们到底在搞什么名堂？他们是否知道自己正在参与一项悠久、排他且具有排斥性的传统？这种全小写写作的风格选择早已是老生常谈，被反复鞭挞、折磨——用我们这一代人的话来说，就是“被玩烂了”。然而，它现在又流行了起来。我必须一探究竟。

for one side of the internet, lowercase writing is feminine.it’s a “formal feature of how girls engage online,” says rayne fisher-quann, who’s 25 and lives (where else?) in brooklyn. known to the web for the all-lowercase personal essays she writes for her blog internet princess, fisher-quann insists that the offhandedness of lowercase “neutralizes” the self-importance of writing about oneself. it’s a way, fisher-quann says, “to avoid criticism.”

在互联网的一端，小写写作被视为女性化的。25 岁的雷恩·费舍尔-奎恩（Rayne Fisher-Quann）住在布鲁克林（还能住哪儿呢？），她说这是“女孩们在线互动的一种形式特征”。费舍尔-奎恩因其博客“互联网公主”（Internet Princess）上发布的全小写个人散文而在网上闻名，她坚持认为小写字母的随意性“中和”了书写自我时的自命不凡。费舍尔-奎恩说，这是一种“避免批评”的方式。

her feelings trace back to the digital spaces she occupied in her adolescence. “i got a lot of intellectual enrichment and influence from early 2010s feminist tumblr,” fisher-quann tells me. a decade-plus ago, incisive microblogs were on the rise on the platform, alongside the now-canonical page justgirlythings. justgirlythings pioneered the art of superimposing an all-lowercase serif-font sentence on a desaturated image (usually of a young woman wearing an oversized jumper and a messy bun sitting by a fireplace). it mostly covered cozy clichés such as “rainy days” and “lazy sundays.” becky campos, the blog’s author, says she wrote justgirlythings “because it almost felt like you were reading more of my diary instead of some polished copy. it showed that i’m more of a real person than some corporation making the posts.”

她的感受可以追溯到她青少年时期所处的数字空间。“我从 2010 年代初的女性主义 Tumblr 中获得了许多智力上的充实和影响，”费舍尔-奎恩告诉我。十多年前，犀利的微型博客在 Tumblr 上兴起，与现在已成经典的页面“justgirlythings”并驾齐驱。“justgirlythings”开创了一种艺术形式：将全小写的衬线字体句子叠加在低饱和度的图片上（通常是一个穿着大号毛衣、扎着凌乱发髻的年轻女性坐在壁炉旁）。它主要涵盖了诸如“雨天”和“慵懒周日”之类的温馨陈词滥调。该博客的作者贝基·坎波斯（Becky Campos）说，她写“justgirlythings”是因为“这感觉更像是在读我的日记，而不是什么润色过的文案。它表明我是一个真实的人，而不是某个制作帖子的公司。”

then there was rupi kaur, the instapoet of my generation. kaur’s work investigated the less manicured parts of the female experience, also through a lack of capitalization, except her words weren’t accompanied by stock imagery—they were the image. this performance of accessible vulnerability, akin to a live-laugh-love pillow, was kryptonite for millennial women: in 2016, kaur’s debut collection, milk and honey, sold more copies than the next-best-selling work of poetry, the odyssey, by a factor of 10. in homer’s defense, he didn’t have instagram.

接着是露比·考尔（Rupi Kaur），我这一代的 Instagram 诗人。考尔的作品通过不使用大写字母，探索了女性经历中那些不那么精致的部分，不同的是，她的文字没有配上库存图片——文字本身就是图片。这种易于接近的脆弱感表演，类似于“生活-欢笑-爱”的抱枕，对千禧一代女性来说简直是致命诱惑：2016 年，考尔的处女作诗集《牛奶与蜂蜜》（Milk and Honey）的销量是排名第二的诗集《奥德赛》（The Odyssey）的 10 倍。为荷马辩护一句，他当时可没有 Instagram。

while kaur describes her fixation on lowercase as an “ode to my identity as a diasporic punjabi sikh woman” (gurmukhi script only has one case) and a way to channel “equalness,” the virality of her work cemented the supple curves of the lowercase alphabet as an expression of femininity during the early days of social media. and the story might end there, if the internet were only populated by women.

虽然考尔将她对小写字母的执着描述为“对我作为离散的旁遮普锡克教女性身份的颂歌”（古木基文只有一种字形），并将其作为传达“平等”的一种方式，但她作品的病毒式传播在社交媒体早期将小写字母柔和的曲线固化为女性气质的表达。如果互联网上只有女性，故事或许就到此为止了。

but, to burst my own algorithmic bubble: behind every justgirlythings fan is a 4chan power user.“i’m willing to believe that [using lowercase] is more deliberately aestheticized among young women on tumblr,” says adam aleksic, an internet linguist who goes by etymologynerd, “but none of the mega online communities use regular punctuation.” he and i are talking at a swanky coffee shop in soho, where he’s finishing up research on why the r-word is making a comeback.

但是，为了打破我自己的算法泡沫：在每一个“justgirlythings”粉丝背后，都可能是一个 4chan 的资深用户。“我愿意相信（使用小写字母）在 Tumblr 的年轻女性中更具刻意的审美化，”互联网语言学家亚当·阿列克西奇（Adam Aleksic，网名 EtymologyNerd）说，“但没有任何大型在线社区会使用规范的标点符号。”我和他在苏豪区一家时髦的咖啡馆交谈，他正在完成关于“r-word”为何卷土重来的研究。

to make his point, etymologynerd pulls up 4chan on his phone and starts scrolling. among the rancid all-lowercase musings, i notice a plethora of greater-than signs, angle brackets, and asterisks. because 4chan doesn’t support—has never supported—rich text (italicization, bolding, etc.), users also employ text-markup conventions: yes for yes, /i/hell no/i/ as hell no, etc.

为了证明他的观点，EtymologyNerd 在手机上打开了 4chan 并开始滚动页面。在那些令人作呕的全小写沉思中，我注意到大量的大于号、尖括号和星号。由于 4chan 不支持——也从未支持过——富文本（斜体、加粗等），用户们采用了文本标记惯例：用 yes 表示 yes，用 /i/hell no/i/ 表示 hell no，等等。

while many may contend that writing in lowercase is a callback to one’s youth, sites like 4chan remind us that, at least within the digital sphere, the callback goes back much further and is part of a larger tradition. “lower case? it started with single-case tty model 33. now, it is habit,” ken thompson writes, in lowercase, in an email where he politely declines my request for an interview. (notice how thompson spells lower case as two words instead of one. before lowercase was a cornerstone of identity politics, it was just a lower case of the alphabet.)

虽然许多人可能认为用小写字母写作是对青春的回溯，但像 4chan 这样的网站提醒我们，至少在数字领域，这种回溯要久远得多，并且是更大传统的一部分。“小写字母？它始于单字形的 TTY 33 型号。现在，这成了习惯，”肯·汤普森（Ken Thompson）在一封礼貌拒绝我采访请求的电子邮件中用小写字母写道。（注意汤普森是如何将“lower case”拼写为两个单词而不是一个的。在小写字母成为身份政治的基石之前，它仅仅是字母表中的一种小写形式。）

ken thompson is 83 years old and, of course, one of the computer scientists to whom we owe the existence of the internet. he’s referring, in his email, to the teletype model 33, a popular terminal used for telecommunications that debuted in 1963. back in the ’50s, computers functioned on terminals that could support only 64 unique characters that—counting numbers, punctuation, and special characters—left no room for lowercase letters. this meant that most early programming languages (fortran, pascal, lisp) were written exclusively in uppercase. it was only between the ’60s and ’70s, when hardware manufacturing started to mature and memory costs started to plummet, that more characters became possible.

肯·汤普森今年 83 岁，当然，他也是我们应归功于其存在互联网的计算机科学家之一。他在邮件中提到的电传打字机 33 型号（Teletype Model 33）是一种 1963 年首次亮相的流行电信终端。在 50 年代，计算机运行在只能支持 64 个唯一字符的终端上，算上数字、标点和特殊字符，根本没有空间容纳小写字母。这意味着大多数早期编程语言（Fortran、Pascal、Lisp）都是完全用大写字母编写的。直到 60 年代到 70 年代，随着硬件制造开始成熟，内存成本开始暴跌，更多的字符才成为可能。

in early 1969, thompson got pulled from a project at bell labs, leaving him with nothing but time. so he decided to try to port a video game he had developed on company-owned equipment, space travel, to a more accessible pdp-7 computer he found unused in a neighboring department. he ended up reconfiguring the pdp-7’s operating system entirely and, alongside his colleagues dennis ritchie, douglas mcilroy, and bob morris, kickstarted the development of unix. unix made programming more ergonomic. with it, programmers no longer had to work with obscure machine code; there was no need to rewrite programs from scratch for every new computer model; and, perhaps most notably, it supported two cases.soon, all the leading research institutions and corporations running on unix had to standardize how they capitalized in code: upper and lower case helped distinguish variabl

1969 年初，汤普森被从贝尔实验室的一个项目中调离，这让他有了大把的时间。于是他决定尝试将自己在公司设备上开发的一款名为《太空旅行》（Space Travel）的电子游戏，移植到他在隔壁部门发现的一台闲置的 PDP-7 计算机上。他最终彻底重构了 PDP-7 的操作系统，并与同事丹尼斯·里奇（Dennis Ritchie）、道格拉斯·麦克罗伊（Douglas McIlroy）和鲍勃·莫里斯（Bob Morris）一起，启动了 Unix 的开发。Unix 使编程变得更加符合人体工程学。有了它，程序员不再需要处理晦涩的机器码；无需为每种新的计算机型号从头重写程序；而且，最值得注意的是，它支持两种字形。很快，所有运行 Unix 的领先研究机构和公司都必须标准化代码中的大小写方式：大写和小写有助于区分变量。