Why We Capitalize the Pronoun “I”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hi, how are you guys doing?

Good, who’s this?

Doing well.

This is Carol, I’m calling from Odessa, Texas.

Hi, Carol.

Odessa.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you very much, I appreciate that.

I’m actually in a classroom full of students, and may they say hello to you as well?

Of course.

Yeah.

All right.

Okay, all right.

What a smart bunch of students, how old are they?

They are great, this is a junior high class, these are actually seventh graders.

Seventh grade.

Well, how can we help the lot of you?

Well, I have a question that has puzzled me for quite some time.

Years ago, I was teaching English at a school, and a fellow English teacher came up and said, why is I capitalized?

And I tried to come up with some clever answer, and I had none.

And so I talked with my father about it, who is an English professor.

He said something about maybe the type setting that might be a possibility, and I’ve never really come across a satisfactory answer, why is I capitalized?

The truth is we don’t have a definitive answer, but the most likely one is what you’re talking about, that it’s so hard to see.

You know, it’s the thinnest letter in the alphabet, and it had a tendency to get confused in the past.

In fact, we added the dot on top of the small I just because sometimes it just looked like a stray piece of something on the page.

Yeah, and two I’s next to each other, which is common in Latin, look sometimes like a U or an N.

And so you had to really work hard to differentiate these characters.

Sometimes they just looked like a smudge that the scribe had made.

We’re talking pre-printing press.

It really was for visual clarity.

Yes.

There might be some complicating factors, but in general, that’s what people understand.

It’s pretty interesting.

It’s since the 13th century we’ve been doing it this way off and on, and it became really established once the printing press became a reality.

Well, bless your heart.

Bless our hearts.

Take your research.

Well, Carol, yeah, it doesn’t have anything to do with ego or anything like that, the fact that it’s the only pronoun that we have that we capitalize.

It’s, as you said, for visual clarity.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that had been a possible answer as well that we’d come across, maybe because we are so important.

No.

No, I am.

I and I.

That’s right.

As we say in Texas, y’all certainly are.

Hey, Carol, I have a book recommendation for you, a really fabulous book on the alphabet that I think your students would enjoy.

It’s called Language Visible, Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z.

And it’s by a guy named David Sachs, S-A-C-K-S, who’s been on our show before.

And he does a little biography of every single letter of the alphabet.

And so you’ll find a lot of this information in there.

It’s a very reader-friendly book about the alphabet and exhaustive.

Yeah. Well, good.

Listen, thank you so much. I know you guys spent some time on this, and I appreciate it.

Oh, thank you, Carol, for your work in teaching our students.

May they say goodbye to you now.

Yes, please.

I think our bell’s about to ring, too.

Are you ready?

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you, Carol.

Bye-bye.

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