EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION/ANALYSIS
Some scholars are rebelling against the basic mechanics of the English language. “Personal pronouns” have been a thing for years, but capitalization recently has come up, too.
One scholar, Professor “j wallace skelton” at the University of Regina in Canada does not use “capitals or pronouns,” Quillette editor Jonathan Kay wrote recently on X.
A “queer” and “trans person,” skelton teaches about “queer studies” in the university education department. The professor appears to be a female who “identifies” as male.
“Its about centering the views, experiences, and knowledge of 2SLGBTQ people, and about queering and transing curriculum,” the professor said in a 2022 faculty spotlight article on the university website.
In various publications, including skelton’s personal website, the professor’s name is never capitalized.
The New York Post recently found more:
The PhD — who is transgender and presents as a man with a goatee — asked on Facebook to be referred to by his full name, j wallace skelton, in place of traditional third-person pronouns like him, her or they — including the lowercase letters.
“lower case letters please,” the header on his Facebook profile reads for reasons unknown.
Meanwhile, a group of French feminist professors recently argued that academics should write “‘in capital letters’ (CAPS)” to promote feminism.
Manhattan Institute fellow Colin Wright, the one who first drew attention to the academic paper on X, wondered if the full article is written in all CAPS.
Only the abstract is available for free online, and it is not. However, several of the words are.
“They want to turn academic writing into activist performance art by strategically using bold all-caps words to ‘do justice to lived experiences,’ attract ‘ATTENTION,’ … and create spaces where ‘resistance is organized collectively,’” Wright wrote.
In the abstract, published by SAGE Journals, the professors wrote that they were “[i]nspired by the practices of Collages Féminicides—an activist movement gluing capital letters on urban walls to denounce instances of violence like femicides, acts of racism, or child abuse.”
They emphasized “the emancipatory potentials of CAPS as a form of feminist academic activism grounded in performative writing” and ask “academics to reframe their (our) writing and research practices in ways that denounce forms of heteronormative oppression and violence.”
The problem is that punctuation and grammar aren’t oppressive. The rules of language are created to help people communicate more effectively and efficiently. For example, “they” is plural, and using it to refer to a single individual is confusing. One would think that academics, supposedly the highest thought leaders of our culture today, should know that.
But academia has devolved into a realm where leftist advocacy takes precedence over clear thought. The CAPS/no caps thing is just the latest example of how badly our universities have veered off course.
MORE: Trump admin ends ‘preferred pronoun’ agreement with Taft College
