My friend, in rebellious anti-structural taps of her thumb, zealously decapitates all proper nouns. Either out of habit or aesthetic compulsion, she has every single contact in her phone written in all lower-case. Very intentionally, she softens Chris to chris. I am not Elizabeth, I am elizabeth or liz.
This process of lower-casing and converting is a deliberate move to make her phone more hospitable. Under her de-capping mandate, contacts and sentences relax. Ambitious Ross student “Hannah Meyars” transforms into poetry-recommending friend “hannah meyars.” Though initially jarring to see, my friend’s rampant de-capitalization of names is elegant in practice. She gives her phone more personality by purging grammatical rules, stepping away from the default auto-correct.
She has broken into a new mastery of the English language, channeling the same high modernists that influenced E.E. Cummings, distrusting the supremacy of the capitalized proper noun. Cummings’s haphazard and rare capitalization defined his writing. Just as Cummings slivered off the top half of “I” in his poetry, my friend eschews hierarchy in text.
In that sense, she is legion. Millions of MLA discontent are presently shaking off their invisible shackles, embracing the fantastical casualness of a lower-case “hi.”
But this dereliction of grammatical convention is not wholly novel. Her texts recall the aesthetic of early 2000s movies, obsessed with the novel “text speak” and ’00s flip phones. There’s a legacy to her texts and contact entries.
What’s more, her choice to decap creates a veneer of comfort. In the midst of turmoil, it’s comforting to see her middle school habits have not yet given way to professionalism. Some things have remained the same. Perhaps I’ll feel differently in ten years but now, her willingness to continue decapping feels warm and kind. It feels like someone knows us well enough to go bravely into the night, grammar be damned. There’s no pretense or judgement — just a consistent, undiscriminating lopping-off of formality.
There’s an urge to denigrate improper grammar as childish or girlish, or perhaps as a sign of a sub-par education. But I feel warm and comfortable, all the way down to my bone marrow, when I see my name in lowercase.
liz. elizabeth.
Not attention-seeking or demanding. Simply a friend’s name, quiet and sure.
Seventh grade grammar lessons bind us no longer.
Daily Arts Writer Elizabeth Yoon can be reached at elizyoon@michigandaily.com
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