Yesterdaze: An Infectious and Nameless Enemy
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There’s an insidious disease in our midst – the Seemingly Random Capitalisation of words. James Elliott goes down the rabbit hole in search of the TRUTH.
I’m really troubled by one of the side effects of the pandemic that no one is talking about. I’ve done my own research into people who have done their own research and it seems to have a very high infection rate among the anti-vaxx and/or anti-lockdown community.
“It” doesn’t even have a name yet which is even more troubling, and makes “it” even more dangerous. “You can’t fight a nameless enemy” is a saying that Chinese martial philosopher Sun Tzu didn’t actually say, but it sounds like something he might have said. So in the interests of public safety I’m going to give the enemy a name in the hope that the battle for elimination can begin in earnest.
“It” is Random Capitalisation Syndrome or RCS – the random capitalising of the first letter of a word to make the word look more like a universally accepted real thing. And straight away you can see just how dangerous an enemy Random Capitalisation Syndrome is.
The battle against Random Capitalisation Syndrome can feel like playing chess where both sets of pieces are white.
Is my capitalising of Random Capitalisation Syndrome in and of itself an example of Random Capitalisation Syndrome? Have I been infected? Should I apply to the World Health Organisation to have Random Capitalisation Syndrome registered as a real thing on their International Classification of Diseases? Or have they been infected as well? Would Ashley Bloomfield recognise Random Capitalisation Syndrome? What about the Director-General of Health? The battle against Random Capitalisation Syndrome can feel like playing chess where both sets of pieces are white.
Fortunately however there are some unambiguous examples of Random Capitalisation Syndrome that can be identified as baseline words of interest. In the phrase “Bishop Brian Tamaki” the word “Bishop” is an obvious example of Random Capitalisation Syndrome, it’s not a real thing. Similarly, in the phrase “Apostle Brian Tamaki” the word Apostle is, again, not a real thing. Indeed it would be all too easy to show just how RCS-afflicted Brian Tamaki is, so let’s do that. In a social media post earlier this week, Brian Tamaki referred to the Gradualism of Tyranny, Medical Apartheid and the last Bewitching Session.
Of course, none of these things is a real thing with the possible exception of Bewitching Session which could be a reference to one of the 254 episodes of the American sitcom Bewitched, which was broadcast between 1964 and 1972. If it was then, that makes more sense than what he actually posted. I could go on listing RCS examples but that would just take us down a rabbit hole of rabid ranting. And by rabbit hole I mean something akin to but not exactly like Lewis Carroll’s Rabbit Hole.
The effect of capitalising truth into TRUTH is to make TRUTH look like something that’s more truthful than the truth.
Thankfully it’s quite straightforward to diagnose people suffering from Acute Random Capitalisation Syndrome, or ARCS (in which the C is silent). These are people afflicted with the uncontrollable compulsion to capitalise all the letters in a word, more often than not the word TRUTH, and more often than not in the most common declaratory question posted in Facebook “Why can’t you see the TRUTH?!” Most people think that capitalising the entire word TRUTH is the text equivalent of shouting the word truth. And they would be wrong. The effect of capitalising truth into TRUTH is to make TRUTH look like something that’s more truthful than the truth.
And since we’re on the subject of questioning what is truth, what is the National Party’s true position on vaccination certificates? In asking this question I must give a shoutout to RNZ’s Russell Palmer for one of the finest first sentences ever written in a news article: “National Party leader Judith Collins has come out firmly against creating a “two-class system” by bringing in vaccine certificates, but she also wants to bring in vaccine certificates.”
To be fair to Judith Collins, it’s not clear how vaccination certificates integrate into the Traffic Light System (might be a real thing, too early to tell, probably won’t be), nor how we transition from the former Elimination Strategy (definitely no longer a real thing, query whether it ever was) to the Traffic Light System. It’s especially not clear to Aucklanders (mostly real people) who have been stuck on a roundabout for 73 days and can’t even see the Traffic Lights.
Finally, just a note about the Capitonym Variant of Random Capitalisation Syndrome. A capitonym is a word that changes meaning when capitalised, for example “there was an anti-lockdown march in March”. The most challenging strain of the Capitonym Variant of RCS is the word variant freedom, Freedom and FREEDOM. This word takes on very different meanings as the capitalisation infection takes hold. My freedom may be very different to your FREEDOM, but that’s just my perspective. As the Cheshire Cat might counsel each of us to reply to the other – “I’m not crazy, my reality is just different than yours”.
HAVE A PEACEFUL WEEKEND!!!
