By Aziz A. Shariff
WHAT strikes me as a quirk this morning was reading in Fortune magazine about OpenAI’s Sam Altman choosing to write in lower case. It feels almost mundane, even practical, to anyone shaped by old newsrooms and mechanical discipline, like me, for instance. In that world, lower case was never an aesthetic rebellion; it was simply the way language moved through machines.
In broadcast journalism, the spoken word was sovereign. Once a script went on air, capital letters dissolved into sound. A proper noun carried no visual privilege over a common one when voiced. Lower case, then, was quietly democratic, every word equal once spoken. Punctuation existed only to guide breath and rhythm, not to assert hierarchy.
That attitude was reinforced not just by the work, but by the people who taught me the work. Allahyarham Tan Sri Samad Ismail, my mentor in the TV3 newsroom, did not bother with such things either. Capitalisation, flourish, typographic vanity, none of it mattered as much as clarity, accuracy, and getting the story right before airtime. If the words worked when spoken, they were good enough.
And the machines enforced this philosophy without mercy. On a Remington, an Olivetti, or a Brother typewriter, capital letters demanded extra labour: a shift key, a firmer strike, a conscious interruption of flow. Over long newsroom hours, that small inconvenience hardened into habit. Lower case was faster, quieter, more economical. Efficiency trumped typographic ceremony.
What’s faintly amusing is how this old newsroom pragmatism has resurfaced in digital culture, particularly among technologists. In emails, chats, and now public posts, lower case signals not rebellion but relief: this is a thought, not a proclamation.
What looks today like affectation may simply be muscle memory, learned long before keyboards became polite, predictive, and obsessed with capital letters.
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Aziz A. Shariff is a journalist of several decades, with experience as a photographer, news editor, graphic designer and writer, most often working behind the scenes, unsung, almost anonymously.
