Posted by Mike Field on April 04, 2000 at 02:44:39 from 203.26.98.91 via proxy cache.net2000.com.au:
This is prompted by seeing the last of several messages posted by people who don't appear to know the answer to this question.
Do they not know how to hold down the shift key? Or has no-one told them when to do it? Are they simply too lazy? Or is typing everything in lower case a cool way to show that they're with-it members of the modern generation -- unlike the rest of us, who are clearly either dorks or old fogies?
I suspect the latter.
The fact that it's much easier to read a piece of any sort of writing (even a bulletin-board posting) if the shift key has been properly used should, I would have thought, be of some concern to them -- their message would then be given the weight they presumably think it ought to receive.
As it is, such writing tends to be given the weight it deserves.
Do any other old fogies remember the short-lived craze in the sixties for one or two novelists (in both senses of the word) to write books without using the shift key? It's pleasing to be able to state that both the books and their perpetrators promptly took the short route to oblivion.