15 thoughts on “Uppercase

  • 4/28/2006 at 1:48 pm
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    How come we don’t have a lowercase Mike?
    Honestly, you’re just too big.

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  • 4/28/2006 at 2:03 pm
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    Maybe the numbers we use are lowercase, and Roman Numerals are uppercase.

    Interestingly the terms upper and lower case come from the printing press days when the character sets were stored in cases on the typesetters desk, one on top of the other.

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  • 4/30/2006 at 9:37 am
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    There aren’t lowercase numbers because you typically don’t put long long paragraphs of numbers together to read them like with letters. The varying heights of sentences make them easier to read.

    You could try this fun experiment at home!

    Open Word
    Type =rand(10) into the new document and press Enter
    Open a new document, don’t close the first one
    Type =rand(10) and press enter again
    Select All and go to Format > Change Case
    Select the Uppercase option and hit OK
    Tab back and forth between the sentence case and uppercase styles

    You’ll notice very quickly that its easier to read the sentence case than the uppercase. Apparently, as we learn to read, we learn to cheat by skimming over the tops of sentences, pretty much reading between the lines and reading the words by the pattern of their top half. If everything is uppercase, we’re forced to read the whole word and its visually tiring after a while, ergo, giant chunks of uppercase text hurt the eyes.

    The more you know…

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  • 5/1/2006 at 8:20 am
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    Excellent comment!

    I think just because of this I’m going to try to start handwriting in not-all-caps from now on.

    Well done.

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  • 5/1/2006 at 10:48 am
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    But, by making your notes “harder” to read by having all uppercase, people think about it more. Perhaps you are already writing in a way that communicates more effectively than the convention?

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  • 5/1/2006 at 8:47 pm
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    Write however you feel most comfortable.
    I don’t think it’ll make a difference in the legibility of your writing though…

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  • 5/2/2006 at 8:51 am
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    If this is the case, then wouldn’t the symbols that are above the numbers be our uppercase? !@#$%^&*() is the uppercase of 1234567890.

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  • 5/3/2006 at 10:53 am
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    I often get emails at work that are all in uppercase. It makes me really hate the sender even though I have never met them.

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  • 5/3/2006 at 10:53 am
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    Ha, I was about to make that same comment, only on a proper keyboard, thusly: !ӣ$%^&*()
    Silly American keyboards putting the @ up there…

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  • 5/3/2006 at 12:08 pm
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    You know what’s funny (to me)?
    Americans call the # the ‘pound sign’, right? Well what’s in it’s place on UK keyboards? The £ pound sign! (We call the # “hash”)

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  • 5/3/2006 at 3:03 pm
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    That is awesome. I still don’t understand why we (Americans) call # the “pound” sign.

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  • 5/3/2006 at 3:58 pm
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    Do english people really use the Dollar Sign($) more often than @?

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  • 5/3/2006 at 7:08 pm
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    No, it’s probably the other way round. But then, why does putting the $ on a number key mean it’s any easier to use? I use the @ plenty and don’t have any trouble typing it. In fact it might actually be a little easier, since I use the left hand to press shift and the right to type @ instead of pressing both shift and the @ with my left hand (why I only ever use the left shift, I don’t know).
    In summary, I have no idea why the @ and ” are swapped round on US keyboards, but I can tell you that it makes typing HTML a fucking nightmare on the odd occasions I’m using one.

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  • 5/3/2006 at 7:08 pm
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    From Wikipedia:
    In the United States of America, the symbol is traditionally called the pound sign. It derives from a series of abbreviations for “pound avoirdupois”, which is a unit of mass. At first “lb.” was used; later, printers got a special font made up of an “lb” with a line through the ascenders so that the “l” would not be mistaken for a “1”. Unicode character U+2114 (â„”) is called the “LB Bar Symbol,” and it is a cursive development of this symbol. Finally came the reduction to two horizontal and two vertical stroke

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