Emphasizing Words

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, is this Grant?

This is. Who am I speaking with?

Hi, Grant. This is Kurt Meyer from Jefferson, Georgia. How are you today?

Great. Thank you. And yourself?

Doing well. Thanks very much.

Hey, Kurt. What’s on your mind?

So much communication happens in today’s day and age through emails or blog posts, and there’s so much room for misunderstanding, it seems, on the subject of emphasizing a specific word in a sentence.

For a long time, it’s been kind of a family joke that there is a particular sentence that changes its meaning based on which words you emphasize.

That sentence is, I didn’t kiss your mother. And I’ve just pronounced it the way probably most people would pronounce it if they read it on the written page.

But depending on which of those words you emphasize, you get a vastly different meaning.

And so, long story short, I guess my question is, how would you express an emphasis in written text?

Great question. How would you do it?

There’s kind of a standard. You could use all caps. You could use bold or italics or things like that.

I don’t know. Some of those seem a little clunky. I don’t know if there’s a good way to do it.

That’s why I’m calling the experts.

What’s clunky about italics or bolding or all caps?

Particularly all caps seems a little contrived. You’re shouting on the page.

Yeah, especially in email communication, right?

Is that what you’re talking about?

Right, correct.

You’re feeling a little like the written language doesn’t have the expressiveness of the spoken language.

Correct.

Yeah, that’s a common problem, frankly.

The written language is an imperfect representation of the spoken language, which has a much longer history and more nuance and inflection than the written language can possibly have, even doing things like bolding and capping and italicizing or underlining.

And there are other ways to get emphasis.

You can insert periods between words to indicate force, you know.

Best show ever, you know, with periods between the words as a form of emphasis.

Yeah, and Grant and I were both on the Internet as early as the 1990s, early 1990s.

And back then, you would often put asterisks on either side of the word.

I don’t see that so much anymore.

Oh, no.

Or underscore.

Oh, it still happens.

Actually, in most Microsoft Word products, the default is if you put asterisks around a word, it turns to bold.

Right.

And there are various markup languages in HTML that use a variety of simple symbols in order to automatically turn things bold or italic or what have you.

Right.

But I’m talking about if you’re just writing in email, in simple text.

I used to use asterisks, but now I often capitalize the first letter of the word.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

But not the whole word.

Correct.

Oh, I see.

So if I didn’t kiss your mother, you would just capitalize the Y.

Correct.

Okay. That’s kind of unusual, though, isn’t it?

I guess it is. I mean, I guess my writing looks a little bit like German sometimes because of the capitals.

But I think I developed that in the early 90s, and I never stopped.

And I think it’s pretty handy because it doesn’t look like shouting.

Yeah. But shouting only really, the whole shouting and email thing is only if the whole transmission is in all caps.

Yeah, that’s true.

The odd word here or there, that’s not really shouting. That’s emphasis.

That looks different.

And I also find that emoticons are very, very helpful.

I mean, I guess I wouldn’t put a winky face after I didn’t kiss your mother, but…

I might.

Right, right.

And that’s a bit of a contrived sentence to prove a point.

Yeah.

But you would never have that in necessarily a business email.

But just to prove the point of meaning is very much carried an emphasis in our language.

And trying to express that is a big trick sometimes.

So, Kurt, what would you do with that sentence if you wrote it?

I’ve used the all caps example. That’s kind of been my default.

And it usually gets a chuckle from everyone, and then we move on to the next thing.

So it sounds like you put a lot of thought on this.

I hope we’ve given you a few more ideas.

Oh, this has been fantastic.

Absolutely.

Thanks very much.

I love your nice show. Keep doing what you do.

Thanks a lot, Kurt.

That’s wonderful.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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