I in America
Here's a bit of a revelation that i've experienced this week. As a reader, you may have noticed that i have been writing the pronoun "I" in lower case lately. I will attempt to do that from now on unless it's the beginning word in a sentence. The conversation that led to this revelation was with one of the English language teachers this week. It circled around teaching pronouns to Japanese students and the difficulties this entails. In Japanese it seems that pronouns are used very infrequently. There are subtle - nonverbal - ways to indicate who you are speaking about. The conversation wove it's way to the pronoun "I" in the English language. The teacher told me that a lot of students ask her why the pronoun "I" is capitalized. Her answer is that in America "I" is the most important word. It got me to thinking...."yo" in Espanol is not capitalized. Neither is "ich" in Deutsch, and come to think of it... "moi" in French. This may be a subtle insignificant thing but i choose to write in lower case from now on. We have become the "me" society to the rest of the world. Maybe a bit of humility is in order.