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First-Person Singular
   

My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except my God Himself.

-- St. Catherine of Genoa
 

It is now a matter of some debate whether to capitalize pronouns such as “He” or “Him” when God is the antecedent.  Many of us were taught in grade school to capitalize the pronoun, except when referring to gods identified with a lower-case “g.”  These days most style books go with lower-case pronouns for all deities, even when referring to God in the upper case.  Some religious types view this as another damning sign of creeping secularization in our culture.  However, it must be pointed out that the King James Bible, which was first published in 1611, does not capitalize pronouns that refer to God. The sole exception (apart from pronouns at the start of sentences) is when the Lord identifies himself to Moses at Mt. Sinai as "I AM THAT I AM."  In that instance, of course, the pronoun is used as part of a phrase that functions as a proper noun.

Now that pronouns referring to the Most High have been de-elevated, the only pronoun that is invariably capitalized is the one we use when referring to ourselves in the first-person singular.  Caroline Winter pointed out in a recent New York Times column that there is no grammatical reason to capitalize the word “I.”  If it were merely a question of expressing self-importance, you would think we would also capitalize “me,” but we do not.  Originally, the first-person pronoun in Old and Middle English was “ich” or “ic,” and the word may have been capitalized when it was reduced to a single letter.  In written form, a stand-alone “i” in the lower case looks less like a word than a typo.

Whatever the typographical reasons for upper-casing the word “I,” the use of a capitalized pronoun inevitably implies that the person referred to is more important than those designated with lower-case pronouns, including God himself.  The Rastafarians have sidestepped this problem with an all-purpose pronoun “I and I” that can denote both the first-person singular and the first-person plural.  Depending on the context, it can be used in place of “I” or “we” or even “you and me” but never refers to oneself alone.  Even when referring primarily to oneself, the speaker uses “I and I” to express a profound sense of oneness with God and with all humankind.  The Rastafarians understand at the deepest level of one’s being the “I” that I am and the “I AM” that God is are one and the same.

Caroline Winter, “Me, Myself and I” in the New York Times (August 3, 2008)

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