WHY WE USE ALL CAPS TO SHOUT, with Glenn Fleishman
Grammar Girl: For Writers and Language Lovers.
Mignon Fogarty, Inc.
4.5 • 2.9K Ratings
🗓️ 19 February 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
1161. Today, we look at the history of writing in all-uppercase letters. Tech historian Glenn Fleishman explains how capitals transitioned from a sign of importance to a convention for shouting. Plus, we discuss his research tracking the association between yelling and capital letters back to 1856 and why early newspapers used all capitals to make tiny type seem larger.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Grandma Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty, and today I'm here with Glenn Fleischman, |
| 0:10.4 | technology historian, writer of many articles and books. Just the most recent are six centuries |
| 0:17.2 | of type and printing and how comics are made, which we're actually going to talk |
| 0:21.3 | about in the bonus segment. And I have to say, Glenn is actually the second jeopardy winner |
| 0:26.7 | to be a guest on the show. The first was John Overholt. So Glenn, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. |
| 0:33.4 | Thank you. And I'm actually taking John Overholt up on his offer to visit the Houghton Library. So I didn't realize he was a Jeopardy winner. So I will see him in a month. And we will confab on Jeopardy. Fabulous. You have that in common too. Yeah, he's amazing. A curator of the Samuel Johnson collection. Looking for more jeopardy winners, I guess, to be guests on the show. Oh, that's hilarious. That's great. How wonderful. Well, thank you for having me on. You bet. Glenn, I mean, you've written a segment for us before about typography words, and you just have so much more to say that I think it's wonderful to be able to just talk. So in one of your books, you have a chapter about shouty caps and where they came from. Let's start with that |
| 1:12.6 | story. Oh, yeah. Well, so I have this, you know, I guess I have a big type of graphic interest. |
| 1:17.6 | And when I started digging in about a decade ago, I went back to some of my roots and started to |
| 1:23.3 | do a lot more research about the history of printing and type and for some reason |
| 1:28.0 | this bubble to the top that people are always irritated about people writing in |
| 1:32.7 | all caps it seems like a it used to be something that old people did right so he's |
| 1:37.0 | always oh you could tell someone's old because they got the cap locks key on I |
| 1:39.5 | think the triggering moment was that one of the the the TALEC service for the |
| 1:43.7 | weather report it was all |
| 1:45.9 | uppercase for a very long time and they suddenly said hey it's not going to be all uppercase |
| 1:49.9 | anymore we're actually going to do upper and lowercase because i don't know if the technology changed |
| 1:54.0 | or they'd finally updated their their software system i mean i think they have been emulating old |
| 2:00.4 | systems it was uh this is 2015 right listen up beginning on may 1st or their software system. I mean, I think they may have been emulating old systems. |
| 2:01.6 | It was, this is 2015, right? |
| 2:03.6 | Listen up, beginning on May 11th, |
| 2:05.6 | NOAA's National Weather Service for Forecast, |
| 2:07.6 | we'll stop yelling at you. |
... |
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