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| Theme - Journalism jargons |
While editing or proofreading, if a letter has to be changed to a capital letter, then a forward slash is marked on the letter, and u/c is written on the margin to indicate that the letter has to be changed to upper case. Similarly, a small letter is indicated by l/c.
I am not sure of the origin of the word. But my guess is that in the manual text-composing era, in the printing press, the metallic blocks of capital letters were arranged in the upper rows and the small letters in the lower rows.
(This post is a part of the "Blogging from A to Z Challenge April 2019".)
You are correct as to where upper case and lower case came from. (I read this somewhere. I thought it fascinating.) I wonder what they called non-capital letters before printing.
ReplyDelete@ Liz - There is an expression called 'small caps' for small letters or non-capital letters.
ReplyDeleteHi Pradeep,
ReplyDeleteMy husband is a letterpress printer andI've done my share of typesetting by hand, so I too can confirm that upper case comes from the layout of the typecase.
Hi Josna - Glad to know that your husband is a letterpress printer; so quite naturally you will be family with typography and journalism. And thanks for confirming my hypothesis regarding the origin of the word upper case,
ReplyDelete