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@inquiline@assemblag.es
The perverse irony of critical theorists, working in the tradition of historical materialism, not doing history, but instead taking history as axiomatic givens.
As for style problems, it usually doesn't stand out so awkwardly, because the abbreviations impacted are longer terms. I mean, it stands out, but it also has an elegance for something like ANOVA or UNICEF to be printed as ᴀɴᴏᴠᴀ or ᴜɴɪᴄᴇꜰ. [Subscript here as approximation for small caps, which typically strikes a happy medium between subscript and standard type.]
There's a vulgarity, prominent in English writing especially, to such all-caps, esp. in light of a semiotics of all caps as SHOUTING.
This is something myself recall seeing in both undergrad (psych) and grad school (anthro), these being decades apart. Certainly not in every text, but in enough texts for it to be familiar.
A quick search reveals multiple guides on how to automate small caps for acronyms, including one that cites to the style guide of The Economist. Wikipedia indicates popular American publications including "Atlantic Monthly" (another platform deadname) and USA Today employ small caps for acronyms of three letters or more.
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@inquiline@assemblag.es
“Small caps are designed to reduce the size of imposing capital letters in a balanced way, so that they don’t disrupt running text.” —Brown 2018, chap. 4
“Small caps create a better reading experience compared to regular uppercase letters because they blend in and flow with the rest of the text”—(Shoaf 2021, checkpoint #37)
https://dev.to/masakudamatsu/abbreviations-in-small-caps-the-definitive-guide-for-web-developers-in-2021-2h82
Brown citation is to a book on typesetting. Shoaf to a "typography master course".
This apparently goes back to the 15th century:
"The typographic tradition of small caps dates to the earliest decades of European printing. Roman punchcutters and type designers included small caps in their typefaces as a practical solution to a specific problem: how to distinguish names, abbreviations, and headings from body text without using full capitals that would visually dominate the page."
https://lettertype.org/blog/small-caps-typography
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