Shift Key

I am willing to allow that certain things are not easy to type quickly. Since I type fairly quickly and make all sorts of mistakes, I can attest to the fact that it's hard to spell quickly. If you don't have a chance to check over what you're typing, mistakes can be made.

Also, if you have to type at the speed of thought, you're going to make some concessions for the sake of brevity. You might (I don't, personally, because I'm a grizzled old prospector from the 1890s) utilize certain shortcuts, euphemisms, or abbreviations in speedy typing. If the number of characters counts, you might leave out words that don't matter or even letters.

I am not here to complain about the fact that these shortcuts, born of necessity, are creeping into places where they do not belong. No sir, that is a topic for another time that I may already have covered (I can't honestly remember).

But how hard is it to capitalize properly on a keyboard? I can't be sure, but I'm fairly sure that it doesn't take me any longer to type a letter while holding the shift key down. I understand that cell phones don't have the same degree of utility, but on computers, how hard is it really?

I also excuse the occasional mis-capital, simply because as I said, mistakes are made. God knows I make enough of them. But to type an entire missive without once pressing the shift key, or worse yet to type the entire thing in capital letters (I assume through the use of the caps lock key, but I can't be certain; people are deranged sometimes) is lazy and annoying.

I've seen people do it for artistic purposes, which I generally oppose from design purposes but which I guess I can let slide from a strictly artistic point of view. But text without sentences is worse than text without paragraphs, and often enough the two go hand in hand. Would it kill you to press that key a few times? I don't think so, unless many people's keyboards came from a company that manufactures them with contact poison on the shift key, in which case I'm obligated to inform you that there are many keyboards on the market and I've never seen one with this feature.

It's all part of my complaints about the degradation of language online, which I may or may not have put into form in the past. And the complaints get tedious even to me after a while. But I promise to keep making them at regular intervals, and spell-checking each one to catch my more boneheaded mistakes. The ones that get by the spell-checker are fair game; please complain to me about them to your heart's content.