It is time for a small grammar rant that has building within me for most of ten years now.
There are many many many blogs out there written in the voice of submissive persons who wish to emphasize their submissive status (or even their notional dehumanized, objectified status as a slave or a pet or a piece of furniture) in their prose. It’s an understandable impulse, and since English rules of grammar don’t have a lot of status signifiers built in, the human language response (inevitably) is to invent some.
So far, so good. That’s what we monkeys do when you give us a language. We evolve it to fit our needs of the day. Gives prescriptivists fits, but oh well, they can suck it.
How do we see this expressed in submissive writing? Well, in lots of ways; but the subject of today’s rant is the use of non-standard capitalization. A submissive or slave will often refer to a dominant by a title like “Master” or “Mistress”; and these will be capitalized just as we have long capitalized references to deities and royalty, to emphasize their exalted status relative to the speaker. The related personal and possessive pronouns will then usually be capitalized as well, for consistency and emphasis. Thus: “After breakfast my Master ordered me to fellate Him and then to lick His boots.”
We’re still solidly on the well-traveled road of language speakers evolving their usages to fit their present needs. Awesome. If a non-standard usage is not only clear, but actually does a better job of transmitting the speaker’s intent than standard usages would do, I have no beef. Again, prescriptivists will squawk, and may suck et cetera.
The road begins to get a little more bumpy when the submissive person decides that if Master is such a lordly fellow that His references need to all be capitalized, then little insignificant subbie shouldn’t put on airs by capitalizing self-references. Thus: “After breakfast i sucked Master’s dick and He said i was a good girl.” Unfortunately converting that usually-capitalized “I” to lower case is just about the only tool the submissive can find in this toolbox, since most self-references in the English language aren’t capitalized. Except — and here’s where the bumpy road goes off the cliff — at the beginning of sentences.
Having found a tool for expressing self-minimization in print, the typical enthusiastic submissive then insists on using that tool rigorously and without exception. Thus: “i sucked Master’s dick and He told me He loves me.” “my Master loves me.”
And this is a problem. Now, readability begins to suffer. Because the OTHER purpose of capital letters is to indicate the beginning of a sentence. It is a primarily typographic function intended to smooth the reading of large blocks of prose. And it is an important function. If you don’t believe me, try and read 35 paragraphs of chatter about “i did this on my webcam” and “my wishlist is on Amazon and i want lots of stuff” and “i wonder if Master really is going to leave His wife the way He promises”. It doesn’t read so badly in-line in my long set of string quotes, but break it up into long paragraphs on a blog and it rapidly becomes wearying. Mix it with non-standard punctuation (a favorite is lots of elipses standing in for periods, dashes, and semicolons all three) and it can make the narrative very hard to follow indeed.
Understand that I’m not purely doing an “old man shouts at clouds” routine here. This is a practical problem for anybody who blogs or types anything anywhere on the internet, because when we do that, we tend to quote each other. And when we quote, it’s normal courtesy to clean up a few simple and obvious errors in the quoted matter, to make each other look good.
But what’s routine becomes rude, I submit, if we are “correcting” deliberate stylistic choices. One typically ought not do that.
So, when it comes to capitalized Masters and “He spanks me, i lurves Him” submissives, we need to leave them alone. But when it comes to an “i” or a “me” or a “my” at the beginning of a sentence:
i won’t do that. my eyes can’t take it. i would go blind. me and my whole clan cannot afford the eye surgery i would need. my eyeballs would wither and then subsequently explode. my heavens, no! i won’t do that.
Hell, Meatloaf wouldn’t do that.
Nope nope nope:
I won’t do that.
So now when I quote submissives, I try to preserve all of their non-standard capitalizations within the sentences, but I sometimes promote their “i” to “I” and their “my” to “My” whenever one of these has to carry the freight of signalling that a sentence is beginning. I think it’s a reasonable compromise that they, themselves, ought to be implementing. “No, Master, i am not repudiating my submission when i capitalize the pronoun for Your pet at the beginning of a sentence. I’m just helping demonstrating that Your girl cares about making these stories easier to read! My heart and my body belong to You, but i understand that typographical conventions are important to clarity!”
