Years ago, on an English-language primitivist internet forum ai would occasionally lurk, there was a user who never used the standard capital letter-ai [i, I] for their first-person personal pronoun. Instead, they wrote out “ai”. This word followed standard capitalization rules, only getting capitalized at the beginning of sentences. In other words, it was pretty much the same as «je», the first-person personal pronoun in French.

This user intrigued me. In fact, for some time after, on and off from 2009 to 2011 or so, ai used the same form for my own first-person personal pronoun – and ai have decided that ai am going to use this form again for this blog.

As a lurker on that forum, who never even signed up for an account, ai never had a conversation with that original user about the logic behind their use of this pronoun. The thing that interested me, and that still interests me, may not have anything to do with their logic. It’s also entirely possible that, unlike myself, that user didn’t understand “ai” to have an identical pronunciation to “I”. They might have thought it was pronounced like ay or something. For me, though, it seems clear that “ai” is supposed to be pronounced in the same way as those two letters would be in the English transliteration of Japanese or Chinese words – as a homonym to “eye” and “I”. This means that the phrases “I ate a sandwich” and “ai ate a sandwich” are homophonic when spoken, even if the orthography is slightly different.

Ai am a fan of this orthographic shift, and this is because, on a symbolic level, ai really don’t like the standard form of the first-person personal pronoun in English, the capital letter-ai. First off, it looks phallic to me. It also looks like a tower – a structure that is cut off from the surrounding world, that alienates whoever is on top of it from the rest of what’s going on around. These are throwaway criticisms, of course, but it also strikes me as strange that it is one of only two words in the English language that consists of a single letter, and that, unlike the other word in that category, “a”, it is always capitalized.

While this can certainly be explained as simply a spelling convention that is used, it is also undeniable that, in many (most?) European languages, the capitalization of certain words can be understood to convey greater importance to the things those words describe in comparison to other words. There is certainly a reason why, in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles, writers and propagandists will often conspicuously capitalize certain words (like “Black”, “Indigenous”, even “Anarchism” sometimes) and just as conspicuously choose not to capitalize certain other words (like “canada”, “the u.s.”, “european”, “marxist”). Ai would argue that the first-person personal pronoun’s consistent capitalization in English has the effect of symbolically valorizing the individual, and ai think it is worth changing for precisely that reason, especially if there is another option available to us.

Please note: ai’m not arguing that we need to switch over to “ai” because the current form has some kind of powerful psychological effect on the unconscious mind of all anglophones. The problem is symbolic, and that is it. Ai can imagine others thinking of me as a similar sort of conspiracist who believes that this spelling convention was set long ago by decided partisans of egocentric patriarchy, and that ai think they are socializing us, brainwashing us, to be like them through their orthographic evil – something that ai personally must stop! So that would be funny, but really, it’s simply a matter of the orthography conflicting with my values in pretty much the same way as the existence of an avenue Christophe-Colomb in my city conflicts with my values.

What ai mean is this: ai don’t think it matters much, but ai’d still rather that the situation be different. It’s not that the status quo – in either the case of the first-person personal pronoun being a capital letter-ai or the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb simply existing – directly does anything to reinforce things that are bad in this society. That said, ai do think that changing the situation, or trying to, might have a positive effect in terms of calling attention to a problem.

That positive effect might be very small, but hey, it would at least make me feel better! And perhaps some other people too.

There needs to be a viable alternative to the previously existing standard, though. In the case of avenue Christophe-Colomb, it’s easy: just name it “avenue de l’Île Tortue”, or even something less explicitly anti-colonial, since pretty much anything would be better than what it is now. With the first-person personal pronoun in English, though, what are we supposed to do? This is the place of “ai”.

Of course, there are other possibilities. Kuwasi Balagoon, for example, makes a conscious effort of not capitalizing his first-person personal pronoun in at least some of his writing. Ai think, though, that most people will read an uncapitalized letter-ai in a sentence like “Before becoming a clandestine revolutionary i was a tenant organizer…” as simply being a mistake. This is why ai like “ai”. When ai use “ai” as a pronoun, and especially when ai do so very consistently, it’s pretty obvious that ai have consciously and decidedly added a letter-ae [a, A] to the word, something which is more noticeable than the mere absence of capitalization in Balagoon’s writing.

There is, in fact, another benefit to using “ai” that has little to do with anything political. In text messages and emails and what-have-you, you sometimes CAPITALIZE a word in order put emphasis on it. This is because you often don’t have the option of italicizing words to place emphasis in these situations. Unfortunately, it is pretty much impossible to emphasize a single capitalized letter-ai in this way; you need to do other things, such as placing asterisks on either side of it. Example: “Well, what *I* think is that we should throw popcorn at them.”

With “ai”, though, it IS possible to place emphasis on the first-person personal pronoun with simply capital letters. Like: “He might have had tea with a bear, but AI once fucking wrestled a rainbow.”

Ai stopped using “ai” a few years ago because it was sometimes difficult to remember whether ai was emailing a person in a “professional capacity” or emailing a friend, and so ai would often get it mixed up. For obvious reasons, ai didn’t want to use “ai” with some stranger from whom ai was trying to get work, and as a result, this represented something of a problem. Ai also just stopped caring, and in fact, had already passed through my phase of writing out words like “persynal”, “womyn”, “wimmin”, and other things of the sort. But now, for this blog, ai am bringing it back – largely because ai still actually like it.

Ai am pretty certain that very few people, if any, will adopt the style of using “ai” as their own based on any of these reasons, but that would be okay by me. What ai have presented thus far are just the reasons that ai like using this style, and there should be space for me to use the style that ai like – even if it doesn’t fit others’ dictates of what constitutes proper English orthography – without having the content of what ai am saying be dismissed. Here, ai am asking that, even if you find this style immediately ugly, you don’t dismiss me based on that alone – and ai am also saying that the same good grace should be extended to those who pronounce words somewhat incorrectly, commit unknowing spelling errors, use certain terms in ways that are unfamiliar to us or simply different from the ways we use them, and whatever else that doesn’t actually make the words of such people any less comprehensible.

A great deal of this blog will make arguments that, indeed, people other than myself should do whatever ridiculous thing ai am arguing for. A great deal of this blog will deal with problems of language that, at least in my estimation, are important for all of us. But ai am also engaging in this project because ai want to do so, because ai like language, because ai like having fun with language. That includes writing things in the way ai want to write them, and not necessarily the way that it is most conducive to being understood – though ai think it shouldn’t be very hard to understand, from context, what “ai” means even if you don’t read this post. It’s not necessarily the approach ai’d take for a flyer to be handed out on the street, but it’s the approach ai’m going to take here.