Books Bygone

Sunday, March 30, 2014

Very Important

Margarita's door
We were chatting about Capital Letters just the other day.

No. Seriously. 

We chat about a lot of trivial stuff here at the Farm and the trivial subject of capitalization in old texts just happened to come up. We floated lots of hypotheses but since Miss M-- who might have made a Major chat Contribution-- wasn't participating in the chat (Miss M hates google chat hangout, but the way) we moved on with no definitive answer as to why folks used to capitalize some Nouns but not others and hardly ever capitalized Verbs and rarely, adjectives. Emphasis before type was invented was, of course, a clear winner, hypothesis-wise.

So this sign-- on Miss M's door-- made me chuckle. Like capitalizing "not" and "disturb" add emphasis. Really? if she had written the sign in all little letters, and put it on her door, i wouldn't have disturbed her. there was a very important call in progress, afterall. i respect that.

And here's where the story gets weird. As I was snapping the photo, I heard a cry. I put my camera down and got the heck out of there. She wants privacy, afterall. But was it a cry? or a laugh? Good Lord! I went back to my planting, tormented by the Question.

~~
Thank The Lord! It was Laughter i heard!

2 comments:

  1. In German, all nouns are capitalized. All the time. At least, that was the practice when I first learned it. I haven't checked any German publications to see if it's still in common use.

    Missed you while you were off, by the way...

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