@oliviarodrigo
In July of 2020, Taylor Swift released her surprise album folklore, stylized in all lowercase. A 2021 NPR headline reads: “On ‘Sour,’ Olivia Rodrigo Is A Lowercase Girl With Caps-Lock Feelings.” And, ofc, we can’t 4get Ariana Grande’s 2018 bop “thank u, next”.
The lowercase girl has been here all along, though.
“People have been experimenting with different typefaces and writing patterns for as long as typing and writing have existed. This is not a new phenomenon of the internet or social media,” says sociolinguistics researcher Lauren B. Collister, Ph.D. She adds that it’s “a way of expressing themselves in written form.”
So then, what is the lowercase girl trying to express? What is it that makes a lowercase girl?
“One of the most iconic examples of [using lowercase] is the feminist author Gloria Jean Watkins, who wrote under the pen name bell hooks. She was publishing books in the 1970s and 1980s with her name all in lowercase on the cover,” Dr. Collister says. “There are some great quotes from her in this Washington Post article about her choice to use lowercase, which might resonate with some of the ‘lowercase girls’ today!”
One reason bell hooks chose not to capitalize her name was to try to keep the public’s focus on her work. “She also wrote to erase her young self, the young Gloria Jean Watkins,” writes The Post, adding that she described, “this death in writing was to be liberatory.”
“A lowercase girl texts and posts in lowercase letters so a