Have you ever wondered why English uses both uppercase and lowercase letters? While capitals begin sentences and proper nouns, and lowercase is used for everything else, this wasn’t always the case.

DEAR DR. ROACH: I have never given much thought to the spellings of various medications. Why do some have an uppercase first letter while others do not? Patent versus generic maybe? -- C.A.W ...

We were helping our 5-year-old daughter form uppercase letters in manuscript when it occurred to me that I did not remember how to form a cursive capital Q. It’s just not something you write ...

Read: Don’t write off cursive Yet the decline in cursive seems inevitable. Writing is, after all, a technology, and most technologies are sooner or later surpassed and replaced.

Well, now for another mind-melter ― there’s a very good reason why we call uppercase and lowercase letters what we do, and it’s because of the original printing presses.