On Language: Me, Myself and I
by Adam Kuban
I started reading Safire’s column last weekend and got a few inches in before I realized something was up. I actually liked it. So I checked the byline. Yup. Caroline Winter was filling in for the vacationing curmudgeon.
She asks a question I’ve never thought of before: Why do we cap I?
“Graphically, single letters are a problem,” says Charles Bigelow, a type historian and a designer of the Lucida and Wingdings font families. “They look like they broke off from a word or got lost or had some other accident.” When “I” shrunk to a single letter, Bigelow explains, “one little letter had to represent an important word, but it was too wimpy, graphically speaking, to carry the semantic burden, so the scribes made it bigger, which means taller, which means equivalent to a capital.”
The piece was titled “Me, Myself, and I,” so I initially went into it thinking it would address some people’s annoying tendency of using “myself” in place of “I.” Which I think they do to try to mute the self-aggrandizing tone of the first-person pronoun
