A linguistic concept that just occurred to me

Now I'm curious about when capitalizing "I" became standard. So I Googled it. In Old English, the word was "ic" which was shortened to "i". The lower case "i" would become lost in manuscripts, so they started using the capital "I" in the 1300's. "Me" was two letters and never lost in manuscripts, so it was no capitalized. The printing press completed the standardization.

I'd guess it has roots in both the practice of first letter of a sentence (most I sentences would start as 'I ... ') and from the fact that i as a single word is an exceptionally odd case.

Why is "umpteen" used as a number of unknown value, often as if to say "any number you can think of" when it literally ends with "teen"?



It sounds like an impossibly high number, but the fact it ends in "teen" actually means it's anywhere between 13 and 19 🤷