i don't like this You business

Dad often sends me snippets to keep me in touch with happenings in India. His latest email had a summary of an article from New York Times reproduced in The Times of India.

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Why is capital I used in First Person Singular Number? Germans respectfully capitalise You. England is where the capital "I" first raised its dotless head. The generally accepted linguistic explanation is that " i" could not stand alone, uncapitalised as a single letter.Charles Bigelow, a type historian and designer of font families, explains, "One little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the sematic burden. So the scribes made it bigger, which means much taller."

So what effect has capitalising "I" but not "you" - or any other pronoun - had on English speakers? It is impossible to know, but perhaps our individualistic, workoholic society would be more rooted in community and quality and less focussed on money and success if we each thought of ourselves as small "i" with a little sweet dot.

Modern e-mail culture has shown that many English speakers feel perfectly comfortable dismissing all uses of capitalisation - and even correct spelling for that matter. But take this step further: I suggest that You try, as an experiment, to capitalise those whom You address while leaving yourself in lower case. It may be a humbling experience. It was for me.

- Caroline Winter

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His email went on to state how for the last several months, The Times of India has been using the first person singular 'i' in lowercase in all articles on the Editorial page.

Sheesh! :/