I Have a Weird Email Quirk
What about you? Plus a big Inconspicuous News Roundup!
If you’ve ever received an email from me, you may have noticed something a bit unusual: I routinely style the text in the subject line as all-lowercase (as shown above).
I’ve been doing this for over 30 years now, and I honestly can’t say why. I mean, it’s not like I have any deep-seated antipathy toward capital letters or anything like that. (On the contrary, I find it annoying when other people use all-lowercase for the body of an email, or even for texting.) But when I got my first email account in 1995, that’s just how I chose to style the subject line, and the habit stuck.
Some of you may be thinking, “Oh, that Lukas — always has to be different, always has to turn everything into some sort of statement or performance.” And while I suppose that could be accurately said about some of my peculiarities (I always make a point of tooting my car horn while crossing a state border, for instance), believe me when I say that’s definitely not the case here. I don’t think there’s anything better about an all-lowercase subject line; it’s just a random stylistic tic that I fell into when I started using email.
Three decades later, I’ve found it a surprisingly difficult habit to break, even as an exercise. If I capitalize the first word of the subject line, it suddenly looks and feels like, well, like someone else’s email. I realize that must sound ridiculous (probably because it is ridiculous), and yet it still feels palpably real to me. This occasionally leads to an internal conflict if I’m typing a subject line that includes a proper noun, like a person’s name or a movie title. If the email is “high-stakes” — a story pitch to an editor, say, or a note to someone whose approval is important to me — I’ll usually grit my teeth and use the capital letters, just so the person receiving the email doesn’t think I’m hopelessly pretentious. But for normal, low-stakes emails with friends and acquaintances, I’ll go with my usual all-lowercase.