Alice Robb, “How Capital Letters Became Internet Code for Yelling” (The New Republic, Apr. 17, 2014)
People have long used capital letters to set text apart and convey its importance, but upper case letters haven’t always signified loudness. The first bloggers may be responsible for that development: Linguist Ben Zimmer pointed me to old “Usenet newsgroups”—the precursors of the forums and Reddit threads that dominate the Internet today—where people hashed out what capital letters would mean online.
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