ME, MYSELF AND I

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.

Consider other languages: some, like Hebrew, Arabic and Devanagari-Hindi, have no capitalized letters, and others like Japanese, make it possible to drop pronouns altogether. The supposedly snobbish French leave all personal pronouns in the unassuming lower case, and Germans respectfully capitalize the formal form of “you” and even, occasionally, the informal form of “you”, but would never capitalize “I”. Yet, in English, the solitary “I” towers above “he”, “she”, “it” and the royal “we”. Even a gathering that includes God might not be addressed with a capitalized “you”.

The word “capitalize” comes from “capital” meaning “head”, and is associated with importance, material wealth, assets and advantages. We have capital cities and capital ideas. We give capital punishment and accrue political, social and financial capital. And then there is capitalism, which is linked to private ownership, markets and investments. These words shore up the towering single letter that signifies us as discrete beings and connote confidence, dominance and the ambition to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

England is where the capital “I” first reared its dotless head. In Old and Middle English, when “I” was still “ic”, “ich” or some variation thereof – before phonetic changes in the spoken language led to a stripped-down written form – the first-person pronoun was not majuscule in most cases. The generally accepted linguistic explanation for the capital “I” is that it could not stand alone, uncapitalised, as a single letter, which allows for the possibility that early manuscripts and typography played a major role in shaping the national character of English-speaking countries.

When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Charles Bigelow, a type historian and designer of the Lucida and Wingding font families, explains, “One little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”

The growing “I” became prevalent in the 13th and 14th centuries, with a Geoffrey Chaucer manuscript of the ‘The Canterbury Tales’ among the first evidence of this grammatical shift. Initially, distinctions were made between graphic marks denoting an “I” at the beginning of a sentence versus a midphrase first-person pronoun. Yet these variations eventually felly by the wayside, leaving us with our all-purpose capital “I”, a potent change apparently made for simplicity’s sake.

In following centuries, Britain and the US thrived as world powers, and English became the second-most common language in the world, following Mandarin. Meanwhile, the origin, meaning and consequences of our capitalized “I” went largely unchanged, with few exceptions.

So what effect has capitalizing “I” but not “you” – or any other pronoun – had on English speakers? It’s impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workaholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focused on money and success if we each though of ourselves as a small “i” with a sweet little dot. There have, of course, been plenty of rich and dominant cultures throughout history that have gotten by just fine without capitalizing the first-person pronoun or ever writing it down at all. There have also been cultures that committed atrocities even while capitalizing “you”.

Modern e-mail culture has shown that many English speakers feel perfectly comfortable dismissing all uses of capitalization – and even correct spelling, for that matter. But take this a step further: i suggest that You try, as an experiment, to capitalized those whom You address while leaving yourselves in the lower case. It may be a humbling experience. It was for me.



Caroline Winter