Start YELLING! It's CAPS LOCK DAY!
Do you know what day it is? DO YOU? IT'S INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY! YAY!
This little-known holiday, according to geek lore, is an ironic little tradition stemming from the perceived overuse of capital letters in online conversation. But even though today is a day for celebrating/lampooning the keyboard key that can turn a simple hello into a verbal strike, we at Crave will resist the urge to yell our way through this post. Being the highly sensitive geek souls that we are, after all, we try to live by the old adage: type unto others as you would like them to type unto you.
Pieter Hintjens and the Caps Lock key: one little keyboard key can cause a whole lot of friction.
(Credit: CAPSoff.org)The Caps Lock key has generated much passion, with caps fans (often considered Net newbies) defending their right to freedom of sentence construction, and some caps haters going so far as to call for the death of the Caps Lock key.
"The Caps key is an abomination, Pieter Hintjens, a software developer and head of CAPSoff.org, wrote on his blog last year. "It's a huge key, stuck right there where the Ctrl used to be, and as far as I know, it's only used by 419 scammers and Fortran programmers."
But why we gotta hate, people? Today is a day for family, friends and respecting our differing keyboard philosophies. Or, as Engadget puts it: "Caps Lock Day is the one occasion when lovers of capitalization can come together with the haters from CAPSoff and hack-a-day and pay homage to the little key that habitually blows up your spot when trying to type a lower-case 'a.'"
Leslie Katz, senior editor of CNET's Crave, covers gadgets, games, and most other digital distractions. As a co-host of the CNET News Daily Podcast, she sometimes tries to channel Terry Gross. E-mail Leslie.
