gormless grammar
ANOTHER day, another trend. I recently discovered that increasing numbers of people identifying as 'Gen Z' - how I loathe these ridiculous classifications - have decided to abandon capital letters altogether and embrace a new fad known (predictably) as 'Lowercase'. I noticed the first letter, too, but what's a stray capital 'L' when you're trying to appear rebellious? Apparently, it all began when a group of friends were simply too lazy to observe those nasty, tyrannical beasts known as the proper noun. [N]ames and places are forever destined to appear as insignificant letters of restricted growth, mere Lilliputians on the mangled radar of modern prose.
A number of opportunistic entrepreneurs have already started exploiting this phenomenon, using 'Lowercase' for their products, although I doubt their accountants will get far if they can't make pound signs appear without using the shift key. Just imagine, an entire string of rudderless financial figures that refuse to tell the company director how many gullible kids he's ripping-off.
Language changes naturally over time. In fact it would be impossible to have a conversation with somebody a thousand or so years ago because that was Old English. A few centuries earlier and we were all speaking Celtic, an ancestor of Welsh and Gaelic. What we have today is something akin to George Orwell's Newspeak. It's not natural evolution; it's top-down linguistic engineering and degeneracy. This takes the form of woke terminology, but it runs deeper. As Orwell rightly pointed out, language is a wedge in the door a person's thoughts. If we can't speak freely, we can't think freely. And if we can't speak or write in an intelligent manner it will inevitably lower our levels of intelligence and increase conformism.