Style Change Henceforth
I'm Not Trippin', It's an Improvement
From here on out (starting this very microsecond), i’m going to incorporate what i like best about the German and Spanish languages in my original Posts (as opposed to the serialized Book Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs, which appears each Tuesday, and the Sundays with Mark Twain series). I will also refrain from perpetuating the thing that i consider to be the most detrimental in the English Language (due to its promoting a selfish viewpoint).
Specifically, i will capitalize certain nouns (a la German), and precede all sentences that end in a question or exclamation mark with the “upside down” version of that symbol (as in Spanish).
So, “My cat is a tabby” will be “My Cat is a tabby”; “My Cat is a tabby!” will be “¡My Cat is a tabby!”; and “Is my Cat a tabby?” will be “¿Is my Cat a tabby?” These are the typographical equivalents of turn signals, allowing the reader to know ahead of time that the sentence contains a question or an exciting statement.
The Interrobang (‽ — a combination of the two punctuation marks under discussion) is also interesting to me (but not yet part of my normal arsenal) as i often mix the two marks (!? or ?!, or even ?!? and !?! when one Emotion is stronger than the other).Additionally, the personal pronoun will only be capitalized at the beginning of a sentence, as is done in German and Spanish (and probably in most if not all other languages), where "ich" and "yo" are not normally capitalized. IOW, “¿Would I like a donut?” will become “¿Would i like a donut?” but “I would like a donut” will remain the same.
NOTE: To insert an upside-down question mark on a Windows computer, press Alt + 0191; for an upside-down exclamation mark, press Alt + 0161. On an iPhone or iPad, press the question mark or exclamation mark, hold, and then select the derivation of it (the upside-down one, in this case) that pops up.