On Sunday evening, as on pretty much every evening, Donald Trump sent a tweet that managed to upset a lot of people. But something about this particular tweet seemed particularly strong, even for a president not exactly known for his tact and diplomacy. This tweet, you see, WAS IN ALL CAPS.
Trump’s tweet was addressed to Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, and is the latest shot to be fired in a war of words between the two leaders after Trump pulled the US out of the Iran nuclear deal and vowed to reinstate sanctions. In a speech on Sunday, Rouhani warned the US that war with Iran would be "the mother of all wars" (he also said that peace with Iran would be the “mother of all peace”). Trump responded by tweeting:
“To Iranian President Rouhani: NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
The language of Trump’s tweet is characteristically hyperbolic, but there’s something about the capitalisation that adds extra force. This was not a tweet; this was an ALL-CAPS TWEET. But what is it about all-caps that makes it seem so SHOUTY?
“The meaning that things like capitalisation have depends on our previous experiences of how it’s used,” says Caroline Tagg, a lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University. “Any typographic resources like this – punctuation, or fonts, or so on – don’t necessarily mean anything by themselves, but they become associated with certain meanings.”
In the case of all-caps, it has become associated with two main meanings: importance, and volume. The former is evident in things like the capitalisation of headings and keywords, while the latter – all-caps to indicate that THE WRITER IS SHOUTING – has become particularly prevalent in digital communication.
A generous reading of Trump’s tweet could suggest that he was just trying to stress the importance of his message and NOT COME ACROSS AS YELLING, Tagg says, but the very fact that it is on Twitter means it will likely be interpreted this way. While shouty all-caps aren’t totally new to the internet (plays, for instance, often use them to show a character is yelling), the convention has really taken off on digital platforms. “With digital communication, because you don’t have access to things like actual tone of voice, or volume, or facial expressions or any of those resources, it means that typographic resources like punctuation and capitalisation come to take on a lot of meaning,” she says.
Philip Seargeant, a senior lecturer in applied linguistics at the Open University, says that the shouty all-caps convention really came into its own around the 80s and 90s, on early internet forums such as Usenet groups and bulletin boards. “The different ways of emphasising things were limited,” he explains. “Nowadays, we’ve got bold, italics, emoji, all sorts of things – in those days you had no opportunity for that.” You could put things in asterisks, space letters out to show you were being very deliberate in your speech, or use all-caps.
Why did all-caps specifically become the convention for COMMUNICATING A RAISED VOICE? Both Tagg and Seargeant suggest that the greater physical size of upper-case letters lends them to an association of increased volume. “It’s a sort of visual metaphor,” Seargeant says.
Tagg points out that in Trump’s tweet, the “intro” – “To Iranian President Rouhani” – is not in all caps, suggesting that he is deliberately to add extra emphasis. “I don’t like to assume there’s any strategy or logic between Trump’s tweets particularly, but he clearly is separating the message from the little introduction,” she says.
Seargeant says that, taking into account the context of the whole tweet, from the choice of words to the exclamation mark at the end, it is clearly intended to come across as very forceful.
He adds that Trump’s use of all-caps, along with other quirks such as his colourful language and frequent punctuation mark use, all works to support his identity as a kind of political maverick, and not what you’d usually expect of a politician. “It’s not a normal way of doing diplomacy,” he says. “It’s the very opposite of diplomatic language.”
So unusual is it – and so strongly do we associate all-caps with an emotive intent – that when news outlets reported on Trump’s tweet, many included the fact that it was written in all-caps in the headline. “Eighteen months into his presidency, he’s still able to generate this sort of interest merely by how he does something as much as what he does,” Seargeant says.