Nina Pick: Radical Orthography

Taking off the Caps Lock

It came to me in a dream: Trump with a lower case t. It appeared in a flash as an ingenious solution, a subtle yet significant way to divest this man—in an Emperor-has-no-clothes maneuver—of the exponentially magnified power that America’s collective psyche has projected onto him. After all, if Apple can make the I into the i, changing its users from capital-I individuals into the iPhone’s mindless consumer marked with the shrunken i of the hungry ghost, we could reclaim orthography as radical action and apply a similar diminutive to Trump. Why not start now? I thought. trump. Hmmm, it looked and felt right. trump it would be from now on.

This little orthographic shift has become for me an important activist commitment. By removing the capital from trump (and the accompanying all-caps FEAR, ANXIETY, and PANIC!), I restore him to right size: he’s a just a man, and a rather infantile one at that, acting out of his own ignorance and fear. This move shifts me out of the role of a small child, scared of a big abusive father, into a reclaiming of my own upper case I, the fullness of my embodiment, my adult womanhood, my own center of power. It allows me to reclaim the Self, which was for Jung the crowning archetype of integration and wholeness.

As the time nears for the President-elect to be granted the title of President, let’s acknowledge and honor as sacred the power of naming, and call trump by the names that better suit him, and spell them accordingly. We could even go so far as to grant him the title of trumpkin, after the grumpy dwarf in The Chronicles of Narnia, if it weren’t such a disservice to the dwarf.

Copyright 2017 Nina Pick

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Trumpkin, as portrayed by Peter Dinklage in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian