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It's Just the 'internet' Now?
This morning Wired News announced that 'web', 'net', and 'internet' will no longer be capitalized in their stories. Is this the next logical step after ditching 'e-mail' in favor of 'email' , or should the global computer network still be treated with a proper name? For more discussion, see Wikipedia, The Chicago Manual, and an article profiling Joseph Turow's de-capitalization efforts.
... we should decapitalize "Google".
So will the "title" for the Slashdot topic icons be changed to reflect this? Or would that be considered a "principal word"?
And this is News? err sorry. news
"it's all ordinary now"
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Can we please make that one word, like most of those who actually build them do?
the intarweb should still be treated with teh proper name
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I don't think it's possible to refer to the Internet without providing a 'the' in the front... is it? Otherwise, there are many possible interconnected networks you'd practically require a proper noun to differentiate...
What the f*ck is the internet?
Fire in the sky
Does it really matter, I'm sure the global economy, and national security isn't going to be comprimised.
wired is stealing my thunder. i started this trend when my shift key broke. curse you wired.
damn shift key, i can't use the exclamation point to emphasize my rage.
www.google.com
or is that no longer around.
Al Gore invented the "Internet" so shouldn't we ask his permission before we change any names?
0 .html
Reference: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,18655,0
It doesn't bother me either way, captialized or not, but I think the comparision to television and phonograph isn't quite correct at this point. As of right now, we only have one Internet, hence referring to it as "the Internet", whereas there are many televisions, etc. To me the captialization comes more from using it like a proper name more than like a brand name. Somewhere down the road maybe there will be many networks called internets and it would make more sense to use it just as a normal noun.
Or we could just not worry about it and get to work on the more pressing problems... should Microsoft be spelled with a $?
Hopefully we can drop /. now and instead hold down the SHIFT and all surf over to ?>
John.
It's like the ocean. The ocean is big, powerful, and impressive, and we owe our existence to it, but even still, we don't call it the Ocean, merely the ocean.
I think the internet is the same way.
it's going to evolve again eventually, because only the coolest net users control the vernacular:
...the list goes on. use your imagination!
intarweb: what we now know as the internet
intarchat: instant messaging or IRC
intarmail: e-mail
intarcash: any paypal-like system
"Stuff that matters", folks!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
:)
Well there was never any reason to capitalize "net" for the simple fact that it is really 'net which is a shortened version of "Internet". I consider the Internet a specific place and thus deserving of capitalization.
If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important.
There are a lot of things that are important that aren't capitalized. Take for example "air" and "water". Most people don't capitalize either one of those. I suppose there may be some groups out there like "wateries" or "airheads" that may refute my claims but they can write their own damn non-sense. I'd prefer they save it for 4/1/2005 though.
That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.
Small nitpick here... If you are talking about "the radio" instead of radio there is a slight difference. Radio is talking about the medium where "the radio" is talking about the big box over in the corner of the living room that talks.
I will continue to refer to it as "Internet" as it is my all knowing God. Maybe that's why Google is capitalized?
lowercase makes one handed typing easier
sulli
RTFJ.
I agree with net and web, but disagree with Internet.
It's the sum total of all networks interacting and deserves to be recognized as an entity as important as a state, country or international organization, like the UN.
"Sig free in '03!"
(Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)
helloooo there is a thing called "wind-chill-effect"
no, really I mean: shouldn't it be world wide web?
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
at least the names are staying the same. there are places in the world... well ok france,..where they have renamed words in an attempt to stop encroachment of english into their language. like referring to email as 'courrier electronique'. my own lack of capitalization today is a tribute to ee cummings however.
And yet another action meant to piss off the Germans. (For those who don't know, in Germanium, the official language of Germania, they avoid the problem of capitalization of nouns by capitalizing all of them.)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
All of it (email, web, IM) has been "the intarweb" to most non-techie folks for some time.
Americans have always been particularly atrocious at picking correct case. Maybe it should be iNteRnEt. I suppose, we should just make everything uppercase and be done with it. It would save 26 characters out of the ASCII set we could use for emoticons!
people stop writing WEB when it's not an acronym or abbreviation.
nobody even bothers with capitalizaton on the net. even when starting new setences. down with capitals down with accents and down with puncutation!!!!shit11111
*shudders*
Okay, maybe it's not that bad, but it's about time Internet became internet.
There never was a reason to capitalize "Internet"?!
Or perhaps Wired News simply don't know what they're talking about?
The "internet" is any set of networks connected with routers. The "Internet" is the largest such network, that uses TCP/IP.
From FOLDOC:
Internet
internet
I am a genius; therefore, you suck.
As for "internet" vs "Internet", somebody should ask its inventor, Al Gore.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
I am all for the removal of as many caps as possible -- as a translator, I am well aware of writers' oft-blind adoration of them. Internet, web, email, etc. - right on!
cheers, potor
Im looking forward to the day when wired news decides on it's own whats right and whats wrong...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
PC will now be spelled "peecy" and CD will be spelled "seedy".
Unknown host pong.
Based on observed trends, it seems to be a good move. As a manager, I rely on my team to give me direction on technological improvements. Decapitalization of key words is consistent with the observed behaviors 'in the wild'. For example, I recently received the following emails that suggest Wired's decision is accurate:
'im working on something alredy, so go stuff yourself and get back to browsing the internet'
'Hey ass, next time you can't get to your stupid Sims board, check whether your network cable is even plugged in before telling everyone that "the internet is down"'
'Jeesus, Ben, stop sending me that gd Bonzai Buddy trash! I don't care if it's cute, that little bastard screwed up my internet settings! I lost a weeks worth of work!'
If my team uses that type of capitalization, then I know it's just a matter of time before it catches on.
Regards,
PHB
Does it really matter?
Does the capitalization improve or impede understanding in any way?
English is a fluid language, constantly changing and slightly different everywhere.
It has different spelling pronounciation and accents everywhere. Despite the best hopes of the wannabe language police, english has and will continue to change.
I see the Internet as a place, like Amsterdam or Mars.
A proper name of place is capitalized, hence i capitalize the Internet accordingly.
Hivemind harvest in progress..
The Web is the World Wide Web. The web is what the spider lives in. The Net is the global TCP/IP network. The net is what the fish are caught in.
I find it amusing that uber hype-mongers Wired (sorry "wired") claim that there was never any need to capitalize, they probably are responsible for it in the first place...
Something that's on the Web can be said to be web-based.
However, I don't think the same works for "Internet." Especially since there's something called "Internet 2."
As far as 'net' goes, if you're talking about "on the Net" you'd capitalize on whether it's your LAN, or on the Internet.
But I do have one question.. Is it now TCP/ip?
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Wouldn't the Internet be a proper noun since it names a specific one of a kind?
A proper noun has two distinctive features: 1) it will name a specific (usually a one-of-a-kind) item, and 2) it will begin with a capital letter no matter where it occurs in a sentence.
So the "Internet" is no longer a unique item, and is common place? I suppose everyone has an internet in their basement?
The internet will continue to be a victim of capitalism.
The reason we capitalise 'Internet' is so that we can distinguish between it and mere 'internets'. 'Internet', with a lower case 'i', refers to any set of interconnected networks. Whereas 'Internet', with a capital 'i' refers to "the specific, worldwide internet that is widely used to connect universities, government offices, companies and [...] private individuals". That quotation incidentally comes from Tanenbaum's textbook, "Computer Networks" (3rd edition, page 16) where he made the exact same distinction that I have just made.
It's always been capitalised and always will be AFIAC.
cheers, potor
A lot of people joke around about this, but the truth of the matter is that he never claimed that he "invented it," only that he secured funding for it. This funding was instrumental in its creation. Really, this whole joke is just another example of a witty Republican smear that has no basis in fact.
o re _internet/index.html
http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/rose/2000/10/05/g
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
The AP Stylebook says that Internet should be capitalized and it's still e-mail instead of email and they still make use of 3 character state codes instead of the newer 2 character postal ones. That book is the gold standard and anyone publishing should be following it.
Capitalization depends on whether the word is being used as proper noun or adjective. Adj. This internet connection is awesome. Noun. This connection to the Internet is awesome.
(Speaking as a Wikipedia admin) - god, oh god, why did you link to the *TALK* page and not the article? Sigh...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
NOW THAT IS FUCKING FUNNY!
Another one that always bothered me..."worldwide" is one word. So it should be Worldwide Web...as in ww.slashdot.org and not www.
So you mean wired news doesn't feel like capitalising the word, eh? Well, here's what I think.. Aren't you suppose to capitalize words that, ah whatever, google can explain it better: http://www.google.ca/search?q=define%3A+capital+le tter&btnG=Search&hl=en&ie=UTF-8/
My point is, isn't Internet a proper name? not a generic "word for"? internet isn't just "inter-connected-network-of-networks", it's, like... CowboyNeal... why capitalize the "Cowboy"? it's part of the name... like, I can't explain it (partly because I've had one to many bawls and don't have the serenity right now to sit down and think of a proper explination) but, like... damnit... it's the Internet, end of story.
I Spit! (yes, I capitalized that).
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
I'll let these guys and gals make the final call on what style I use when I write.
Can't you people see that it's a Capitonym
RTFW (read the fscking Wiki)
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Is it just me or Wired is to the internet geek culture as Playboy is to women's liberation movement?
In any case, "email" makes sense; it's no longer electronic mail, analog to the postal mail - it's something entirely different, a platform for multi-user discussion, push content, information retrieval (auto-responders, Agora, etc.), and, yes, as one of its many uses, personal one-on-one communication!
Who cares? If people devoted this much time and energy into other (more useful) things we might have been able to cure cancer by now. Or who knows what else.
i cant seem to come up with a sig.
cummings
would
be
proud
bp
Who gives a damn how wired spells it? They act like they dictated down from on high and expect the rest of the world to follow.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I almost NEVER proper-case microsoft (lower-casing/deprecation intentional). Sometimes, to get around honoring uppercasing for ms, I just use the initial msie, ms excel, NT4.0, win XP or W2K SP#... This way, it looks like a minor omission.
Hmm, I guess ms will try to use meta tags and other technology to "clean up" documents, especially those that have "microsoft" (lower-casing/deprecation intentional) in them. Or, didn't they try that, only to be blasted for over-reaching into peoples' documents?
When will we get people to correctly use:
-"log on" as a verb and "logon" as the noun?
-"insecure" for emotional states of mind
-"non-secure" regarding the nature of the Internet. The Internet cannot be "insecure", since it is not a sentient/organic/thinking thing.
When I was aboardship/aboard ship, and was Petty Officer of the Watch, I/we answered the landline/land line as "Quarterdeck, USS Flint. Petty Officer Syes Speaking. This is a non-secure line; how may I help you sir, or ma'am?"
Phone lines are never insecure, so why the Internet? I think it was because a bunch of marketers took over the security message aspect of the Internet. Or, some engineers who are FANTASTIC programmers just happened to select the wrong word from the dictionary and it "stuck".
Even "unsecure" might seem better that "insecure".
=========
Hmmm... I just ran a "dictionary.com" search on "insecure" and got these:
1. Not sure or certain; doubtful: unemployed and facing an insecure future.
2. Inadequately guarded or protected; unsafe: A shortage of military police made the air base insecure.
3. Not firm or fixed; unsteady: an insecure foothold.
4. Lacking stability; troubled: an insecure relationship.
5. Lacking self-confidence; plagued by anxiety: had always felt insecure at parties.
========
Well, to me, number 2 sounds stupid, as if someone POST-COLDWAR got caught up in the "insecure Internet" description thing.
I guess I'll have to go to pre-Internet boom dictionaries to find out if "insecure" back then was described as in item #2 above...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
WWRMSD?
("What would RMS do?", natch)
With most of the words in question, I don't see the point in having the first letter capitalized, such as email, web, net (wich is slang for Internet), but with Internet vs. internet, I thought there was a difference between the 2, where internet refers an "inter-network (a link between networks which has not been tied to The Internet), and Internet refers to the "net".
Does that mean I can tell my users that they can quit referring to our network as the Intranet?
The UN is important?
For example, in German, all nouns are always capitalized.
I was listening to NPR a couple months ago and some guys who were at Xerox PARC in the 70s were on talking about various things, I can't remember specifics but they all individually, and as a team, invented most of the fundamental portions of the DARPA/internet. The host asked one of the guys to define what the internet was and he said it was two more more networks that were connected.
So, we have "internets" all over the place. Now, in general reference, when somebody says "the internet" they are talking about a specific internet, the one we are using here. But that does not neccessitate capitalization (there are many houses on this street, I live at the house (not House) on the corner.
sig.
Correctimundo, my friend. I was wondering why nobody made this point: any routed network using the Internet Protocol is an internet. The first private or restricted internets like MILnet were around long before the publicly-facing portion of the ARPAnet expanded into the Internet.
now it's only a boring plain old noun we'll be turning it into a verb before you can say internetting and internetted.
Wikipedia has a good write-up at the top of its entry for Internet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
and I appreciate the manner in which it addresses the "popular parlance" for "internet" in terms of the commonly used services on the Internet, e.g. "A system running internet services." (my example, based on Wikipedia's narrative).
There is also a good discussion of Capitonyms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitonym
I think Wikipedia got it right.
...he would prefer that the Net be called by it's proper name, Skynet.
... because there is only one of it. If there were several 'internets' then it would be a different story.
Just because something becomes far too omnipresent for the public now, it doesn't make sense that we decapitalize it. I can guess the "-" in email was always a source of little confusion and also took those extra milliseconds of your typing. But making Web web is nothing very intelligent.
Like that, we must decapitalize Microsoft bcoz 100s of millions of ppl use its OS (and many others use pirated versions). Or make Linus, linus, due to his sheer popularity.
Noun is Noun.
mostly librarian-types (hmm, interesting copy on that story....
(a) Nobody cares. Nobody, most of all Wired (which tries to coin terms and screw with the language unsuccessfully on a very frequent basis) has the ability to just decree that everyone is going to change capitalization or spelling of a word. The includes dictionaries -- they just codify common usage.
(b) Insofar as there is a correct way of doing things, "Internet" should be capitalized. We use "the Internet". It is a proper noun (which, surprise surprise, should be capitalized) that refers to something quite different from "an internet" -- I can build "an internet" running IPX attaching a couple of networks, but "the Internet" runs IP and is a rather large entity that currently spans the world.
(c) I hate journalists that try to leave their mark on the world by affecting the language.
(d) Tell you what. I think that there's "no reason to capitalize 'Wired'" -- after all, there's another term, "wired", which exists, and surely we should just merge the two. So from now on, "Wired" can be referred to as "wired". Of course, the newly-redubbed "wired" people will probably take issue with this, as it's confusing and doesn't gain anything, and violates English rules, but I want to get my name out there on etymologies for mucking with a word. It's "wired" now. Oh, and "Tony Long", the editor pushing this? He can be "tony long", or just "long" for short.
May we never see th
When the dot com bubble was very inflated, it was "The Internet". Since the burst, the name has deflated and is now known only as "the internet".
I'd rather be sailing...
just use... 111 everyone ... 111 see /1/1/1
eheheh
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
We are not talking about informal bs'ing or the fact that people pronounce things differently. We are talking about a proper place, ie the Internet. Between friends, in a chatroom, here etc, I don't see a problem with calling it the "internet" or "net" for short. We all do. But any half decent publishing house or reporter with any respect for formality or actual literary standards will continue to call it the Internet.
"Despite the best hopes of the wannabe language police, english has and will continue to change."
I don't think anyone is against the English language gaining new slang words or expressions. But in formal settings like publications proper language conventions should be followed.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
CYBERSPACE
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
Why would you look to Wired for questions about language? That's what dictionaries are for! If you want to know if a word should be capitalized or not, look to a dictionary like OED or Merriam-Webster. Incidentally, Merriam-Webster lists internet with a capital "I."
-Rich
No no no. A unique artifact of civilization deserves capitalization.
Would you go with "statue of liberty"? "rock of gibralter"? How about "eiffel tower"? "great pyramid"? "the arch"? "rockefeller square"? And on and on and on...
Oh, and don't forget to visit the george washington memorial when you go to washington.
how about we just drop caps entirely? three less keys on my keyboard and, even better NOONE SHOUTS ANYMORE!!
It looks like it's about time for me to revive my early 90's plan of rebranding the word "internet".
I propose that, in honor of Doctor Norbert Wiener, inventer of the term 'cybernetics', and the 'cyber-' prefix in larger use, we should refer to the internet as 'Wienerspace' from now on.
Try it!
'I logged onto the Wienerspace last night, and looked at my favorite web sites!'
This morning Slashdot announced that 'Cowboy', 'Neal', and 'CowboyNeal' will no longer be capitalized in their stories/forums/polls.
What is slashdot?
that's the url that showed under a google "capitalize internet" search. I didn't see enough on the article page for it...
In the post.. "Is this the next logical step after ditching 'e-mail' in favor of 'email'[...]" From wired: "Foremost among them is the insertion of the hyphen into "e-mail." It's a decision -- made for both practical and symbolic reasons [...]" I think you got the post wrong mate :p
Signifying a unique thing. Any old network isn't capitalized, but (for example) Usenet isn't just any old NNTP connection, it's a public, widely used network of NNTP and UUCP and whatever else connections.
The Internet is the same- it's not just a bunch of machines connected together via TCP/IP, it's the collection of machines connected together via TCP/IP.
More importantly, though, a LAN is a net, but not the Net. A couple machines hooked up through NNTP isn't Usenet, it's a newsfeed. A web of HTML documents accessible via HTTP isn't the Web, it's just a web unless it's on the Internet.
--Matthew
In tech circles and especially here on slashdot, how is this article relevant? /.ers as a whole rarely proofread what they write or ever spell check it. So again, this article may be irrelevant to a vast majority of /.ers.
Except, of course, me, who has perfect grammar and spelling...NOT
Nuttles
Saved by grace
Saved by grace
Seriously, why should we follow it? What made it the gold standard? Why is it better than the Chicago Style? It sounds as if they are attempting to impose their own standards on a rapidly changing field, and are out of touch with the popular practice. Three character state codes? Please.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Since when has a professor of Communication been more than a reporter? Me, I'll capitalize it without his permission, like I always have. The Internet is a name, much like Earth. It may be capitalized or not at the discretion of the user.
Let him sit back and teach his students what the rest of the world does when it communicates.
Not a brand name, yeesh.
The leading newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat made a similar decision several years ago. Although that decision was about the Finnish language, it is relevant here since the relevant bits of capitalization customs are essentially the same in Finnish and English. Of course, not all Finns follow the lead of Helsingin Sanomat :)
As I recall, the newspaper's argument was that the Internet is a phenomenon and therefore should be treated as a general noun. I don't really buy that, though.
In the regular flamewars in Finnish newsgroups on this topic, it has been pointed out that nobody actually uses "internet" in the supposed alternate meaning (an Internet Protocol based network of networks that is not necessarily the Internet) in actual text. A message discussing this difference is naturally disqualified.
Who Gives A Shit ? No, Seriously?
Sorry, that is now wired news - no need to capitalize anymore. We're getting dumber and stoopider and lazier so we shouldn't even have to use punctuation or proper spleelings anyways
How much longer do we refer to the Earth before we stop capitalizing it? ...or the Eiffel Tower? ...or the Olympics?
Who is going to tell all the word processors of the world the new spellings?
None other than Vint Cerf told me that 2 years ago when I met him in Toronto, ON. I don't doubt that there are some smart folks kicking around /., but when it comes to what this big network thing should be called, I'll stick with the advice of one of its founders. As for the capitalization thing, who cares.
Okay, so now that 'internet' is not capitalized, can we work on educating people to stop asking 'what version of the internet are you using?'
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
I used to search and surf for hours on end but now I primarily use it for Instant Messaging and visit no more than 10 sites per day, such as news, hobbies or credit cards/finances.. Frankly there just isnt anything that interesting out there.
When I'm camping, I'll go through a period of intense withdrawal. I'll be thinking to myself, "I need to get on the internet", I'm thinking "internet" in lowercase letters.
It's become ubicquitus.
e.g.
Please close your windows.
Clean up your windows.
Broken windows.
Replace your windows.
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
Capitalization is determined by whether or not something is a proper noun, not by whether it is a brand name. The Internet is a proper noun, as opposed to "the internet", which would refer to, say, one's private corporate internet.
If you'd like other examples: nobody owns the "Pacific Ocean", but because there is only one "Pacific Ocean" (despite being many oceans that could be called pacific) we capitalize it. There are many moons, but only one Moon. There are many presidents, but President as a title is capitalized, because it is used as a proper noun.
The proper way to refer to Google is "Google" when using the term as a noun -- it is a proper noun that refers to a company. The *verb* "google", meaning "to search for on Google", is not capitalized.
May we never see th
It seems to me that all this de-capitalization business is a bit silly. It should be a moot point. Words in the English language are capitalized when: (a) they are used to start a sentence. (b) they are used as a "proper noun." The term "internet" without the capital 'I' is an "improper noun", i.e., normal noun. Traditionally, the improper noun form has been used to mean "a network of networks." However, when one is talking about *the* (commonly known) worldwide network of networks, overseen by some authorities with a documentable history; a proper noun "Internet" is not only possible, but proper! If you want to de-capitalize something, how about newspapers quit printing "West Texas" and do it right: "west Texas," as Texas is not seperated into two states the way, say, Virginia and West Virginia are. "Texas" is the only proper noun in the phrase "west Texas" ("west" isn't even a noun, it's an adjective in this case!) Why do I bother? Ppl r goeeeng 2 rite lke ths N teh footure newayzzz--'coz nobdy karzzz. Or worst, it'll be L33T.
Can we now ban apostrophes in "CPU's", "MP3's", etc.? It just kills me that even The New York Times (which is normally a stickler for grammar) has adopted that bastardized punctuation as their standard.
When violence rules the world outside / And the headlines make me want to cry / It's not the time to just keep quiet
How many Internet's are there. If the Internet was one of many different (meaning US internet, Mexico internet, UK internet, etc) nets than I would agree. But it is just one thing and therefore should be capitalized.
My boss of my last job asked be to capitalize the word intranet but I told him that there are different's intranets. There was ours, the vendors with worked with, are customers, etc...everyone has their own intranet but there is only one Internet and it should be capitalized.
me
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
It's funny that in the development of the roman alphabet, originally there were only capitals. Lowercase letters were developed to make text more legible. So what do we actually still use capitals for? I mean, capitalizing names or words in a title or nouns etc. is just a convention. Just like spelling. In Europe, languages occasionally undergo a spelling change. What bugs me is why they never change the spelling to be consistent, let alone phonetic (e.g. corresponding 1 to 1 with the sound).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
We should go back to calling it the "Information Superhighway". I love it when my coworkers call it that.
I've never capitalized 'internet' but my word processors always want me to. Hopefully this is changed soon also.
I just wish this mysterious cabal we think of as the Common Usage Council (i.e., "They") could settle on one term for the USB drive.
I've heard / seen them called: Thumb Drives, Flash Drives, Pen Drives, Stick Drives, USB Drives, Key Drives, Keychain Drives, USB Key Drives, etc, etc, ad naseum.
I guess my personal favorite, "Weenus Drive", is completely out of the question. (Sort of puts a new spin on the write-protect toggle, tho.)
Yours is the second post whining and blaming Republicans. Why don't you pin the blame on the late night morons like Leno who repeat it every time Gore gets in the news?
Oh, I forgot, everything is a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Democrats never smear their opponents or say a negative word about them. You know, like having divorce records released to the public forcing the candidate to resign, or filming entire "documentaries" that stretch the truth to bash someone. It's all flowers and innocence over on the left.
At least get your spelling right, sheesh
If MS keeps capitalizing 'Internet' and Wired stops capitalizing 'internet', will we have a new war...Perhaps this is the E/etiquette wars?
You were rated "+4 Insightful" though you just stated your preference for lowercase without supporting or explaining it. Why bother with capitals at all? You capitalized your login, the letters "MS", "Word", "I", and the first letter in each sentence. To use your flippant words: grammar does demand it. You follow some of the rules... why not follow the rest. The rest of the world has caught on; check the front page of Slashdot: it's chocked full of grammatical errors.
Apple is now required to capitalize the first letter of iPod, iMac, and iBook.
Has noone RTFA? The submitter had the email thing backwards, wired is now using e-mail, precisely because the 'e' is a contraction for electronic, and thus a hyphen is needed to show that letter were omitted.
And how about "cites," unless they're going in your bibliography (and even that's grammatically incorrect).
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Umm. Most of the rest of the world already does spell internet without the capitalization.
I used to work at an English-language newspaper in central Europe and we made the editorial decision to stop capitalizing in late 2002. Yes, yes we all knew about the 'an internet (network of networks) vs. the Internet' argument, but in the end, we dropped the capital to keep better consistency with the rules of English grammar -- i.e. that it's more akin to 'the sun' than to 'the Queen'.
I've wondered more than once why the capital letter was thought neccessary in the first place.
Wonder if wired is bold enough to mess with God.
We still capitalize the Earth, Atlantic Ocean, and McDonalds. Just because something's world-known and basically ubiquitous doesn't keep it from being a proper noun.
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Even worse: here in the Netherlands they don't refer to it as the Internet, but simply as 'internet'. So, now it's 'I found it on internet', just as it's 'I saw it on TV'. It seems to me that the Dutch technical crowd still refers to it as 'the Internet', but the popular press is just hopeless.
How can a publication that called itself Wired be so disconnected?
Now if only someone could convince the NY Times (and many others) to stop using CD's as the plural of CD, I'll be very very happy.
Actually, if you follow the link in this particular line of the slashdot article, you'll find Wired News's article on why they abandoned 'email' for 'e-mail' -- because 'e-mail' is grammatically correct, and 'email' is not, at least according to their reasoning. (It's actually a pretty good article, and one I read years ago.) Wired News did this ostensibly because the medium has "grown up" and the stylistic rules for the publication should reflect this. Or something.
Were one to read the slashdot article without following the link, you'd think that Wired dumped the hyphen from 'e-mail,' when in fact they didn't dump the hyphen at all -- rather, they started using it. This usage agrees with Webster and the OED and various other style guides in the industry. The previous use of 'email' without the hyphen was what they got rid of.
Personally, I don't care if people capitalize 'internet' or not. I prefer to capitalize it in most of my writing, because the Internet is a thing, a unique entity unto itself, and deserves to be considered a proper noun. It's not quite the same thing as television, which is a more nebulous and abstract concept (the word could describe the technology in general, the broadcast standard, the hardware used to display the broadcasts, or the programming that is being broadcast).
...(n/t)
There's lots of capitalised proper nouns that are "obviously" unique and don't need to be capitalised. Wired should drop the uppercase letter for "god", "united nations", and "president of the united states". That'd generate lots more juicy controversy as well, which is after all the point of the excersize.
Actually, if you're just trying to be Wired (which means being relentlessly hip to try to avoid losing their self-assumed position as authority on Internet culture), there's a fair number of predictable "next moves":
Internet becomes "iNet". This is to fit with Apple's product naming scheme, which is cool, and therefore something that Wired is terribly concerned about associating itself with.
"I see" becomes "i c". Wired constantly promotes the claim that the Internet (oops, sorry -- "internet") is going to completely drive our lives and our culture, and currently most authorship is done via chat. What better way to argue their point than to let themselves be completely swayed by typos and shortcuts from chat?
Micropayments are "hip", so Wired stops selling "subscriptions" and starts selling "micropayments in twelve chunk block minimums".
"Internet time", or "beats" (a desperate attempt by Swatch, who has put every useful gadget and more onto a watch, to produce new required features to drive watch sales) will be adopted by Wired. I'm not sure that "beats" are hip or not, but they're certainly stupid and Internet culture-oriented, so Wired should love them. They can say "It took me @45 to write this article".
Wired will no longer refer to themselves as a "magazine". "Magazines" are pre-Internet culture, and "'zine" is only marginally more "hip". No, tablet computers are "hip", and so Wired will sell "paper tablets".
Speaking of "'zine", almost any word can be made more hip by chopping some prefix off and replacing the prefix with an apostrophe. We know this because a couple of sci fi authors have done this. Therefore, I won't "Download and read Wired on the Internet by 4:00 PM". Instead, I'll "'nload 'n rez wired on the internet by @3452". Where would we be without Wired for entertainment?
May we never see th
I certainly hope not, I use php a lot still.
Let's go /. ?> so that we still get our <?php
Are we also going to start lower-casing acronyms?
It seems that everything that requires a bit more thinking or complexity, even if it's trivial, gets simplified. That is why we no longer have beautiful architecture, furniture, et cetera with ornaments, but rather super-simple, utilitarian everything.
Lame.
Simpy
I'm with Knuth on this one. See the bottom of the page.
"Given the pace of technology, I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." -- Calvin
Maybe they're just "Vive La Loafing" as here.
At least give a reference when you steal something word for word!
"If a quarter is two bits, then a dollar's a byte." -R Deric Miller
"A site on the Web is a Web site... Website, capped or uncapped, is jibberish--it means the same thing as 'zhoxting.'"
-- from "Lapsing into a Comma, A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print -- and How to Avoid Them" by Bill Walsh, Copy Desk Chief, Business Desk, the Washington Post
There's an argument here about whether this is truly a proper noun, but Wired doesn't state it clearly, and they're backing it up with some silliness. People don't capitalize "Bush" because the man's important, they capitalize it because it's a proper name. We don't take the caps down when we just use someone's last name, or when we refer to Microsoft without saying "Corporation." Wired is saying "World Wide Web" is a proper noun, but that "Web" isn't part of that proper name -- it's "facial tissue," a generic term. They need to work that out a little better to satisfy me.
Internet is the name of a specific thing, not a type of thing. I'm not sure I'm with them as far as "net," either. That's a nickname based on a contraction, isn't it? Do you call Richard Nixon "tricky dick" in print?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I never found a reason to capitalize works like internet, web, etc. unless grammar demanded it (like starting a sentence). The question now is, how long is it going to take the rest of the world to catch on.
Cruel world, isn't it? I'm sure the Ebonics people sympathize with your plight.
May we never see th
Make Mac users create their own net and then they can call it the iNternet? Then we can still have the Internet to ourselves.
Izzlefooshizllenet
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
"There's no reason to spell it that way now. In fact, there never was one."
The abbreviation 'i.e.' does NOT mean 'for example.' If you want 'for example', use 'e.g.'
The former is an abbreviation for the latin 'id est', which means 'that is'. It's a rephrasing of what came before.
Your use is probably not strictly wrong, as reading it with 'that is' works, just 'e.g.' ('exempli grati') would work better.
frigidaire xeroxes kleenex. kodak at eleven.
This sig no verb.
A certain finnish computing magazine has a policy that there will be no capitalization of ANY term. That's right, all acronyms (GPRS, VoIP, LAN, ATM) will be in lower case (gprs, voip, lan). If it's a product that has some weird-ass capitalization (iTunes, iMac) they just do it all-lowercase. (How would you use iTunes in beginning of a sentence, anyway? ITunes?). However, names are not in lower case, ever. IBM is still IBM. Actually, if you check out the page now, you can see in the left pane a blurb about Gmail (in uppercase) and video at VGA resolution (in lower case).
:))
I gather that they originally came to this decision because lots of writers started to ask the questions that how are they going to write all those L33TAcRoNyMs that everything that is nice about language, and they made a blanket decision. (Again, how do you use iTunes in beginning of a sentence...).
This sometimes pisses the more technical engineering crowd off because they prefer the original form, but they have stuck to their line. (Oh, and I'm not a subscriber
However, even they have not touched names. Internet, The. There are also intranets, extranets and internets.
Welcome! To Planet earth!
That entry in Wikipedia is pretty unusual, in that it heatedly expresses an unorthodox personal opinion at variance with common usage.
Most of the Wikipedia steers well clear of personal opinion and controversy. It's a pity that this key entry is so awful.
I'll get over the capital I when you get over Jesus.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
internet
<networking> (Note: capital "I"). The Internet is the largest internet (with a small "i") in the world.
Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2004 Denis Howe
(courtesy of dictionary.com)
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Aren't there more important things for folks to worry about? Such as making the Internet/internet more secure instead of worrying about how to spell it?
I thought the point was that my 192.168.1.0/24 behind my linksys access point is "an internet". The 66.35.250.0/24 slashdot is on is "an internet" (unlike mine, a publicly routeable one). An internet is any network that uses, surprise surprise, the "internet protocol".
What you are talking about is an intranet, not an internet. The Internet is the connection of multiple networks to each other. It is a network of networks, thus it sits between other networks and earns the inter- prefix. Intra- means within one's own logical grouping. A corporate network, Slashdot's server farms, and your person home network are intranets because they are a network of machines within one logical organization.
This is why there can be only one Internet unless you make a completely separate other network between networks that doesn't talk to the first one at all. That's very unlikely to happen until we start building colonies on other worlds, and we'll probably have slow, laggy connections between them even then. I see no reason to decapitalize the Internet since there can be only one. (No Highlander jokes, please.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
WiFi/802.11b/Wireless Ethernet
flat panel LCD/LCD/flat panel
TiVO/PVR
Red Hat/RedHat/Redhat
May we never see th
Internet is a proper noun (in this case, a name). It is the Internet. There is only one, and it has a name. Of course it should be capitalised.
Same with "the Web", although I think saying "Web" is silly anyway, as it's a "net", not a "web". Unless there are some historical issues I am unaware of.
Now, "Net", on the other hand, was wrong from the beginning. To denote the fact that we left out the "Inter" bit, we need to add an apostrophe, thus making the abbreviation "'Net". That's how I've always written it.
The IHT article mentions how "Phonograph" used to be capitalised. Well whoop-te-do. There were hundreds of phonographs going around, so of course they should not be capitalised. It's not a brand name, there are many of them. The 'Net, on the other hand, is singular. There is only one, there always will be only one. Even if similar systems are created in the future, they will be called something different from "the Internet". Perhaps they will be called "internets", but there will always be only one, unique Internet.
fuque wired and the horse they rode in on
People who capitalize "internet" are the same grandmas who call it "the world wide web" and "the information super-highway". And those who use 'net look like persnickety wankers right off.
tone
That way we can use "Internet" and it has the feeling of a concrete proper noun, rather than "the Internet" / "the internet" inviting confussion.
There is only one internet. I'd move on, if I could find that damn "any" key to continue
--
make install -not war
What a completely boring game of semantics. Who cares whether it's capitalized or not? Why in the world is it news when they choose not to capitalize it any longer? What self-absorbed nonsense!
... avoid such stories about capitalisation. :o)
sevencube blog
MP3s is a good example. "MP3" is not a word. It is not even an acronym, since it has no discernible vowels and the "3" is clearly not a pronounceable letter. Furthermore, it does not have a meaningful plural form: MP3s would presumably be pronounced "em pee three ess", but the actual pronunciation "em pee threes" seems to suggest that there are a set of threes of the MP variety.
A really stuffy way of indicating what is intended would be to write "MP3"s, to indicate that the thing in quotes is actually a quotation of informal speech. So it is quite reasonable to put a less ostentatious punctuation mark to say "Hey, this is a complete bastardisation of English, but this is what people are using."
Personally, I think that "MP3 files" is clearer and less offensive to us grammar Nazis, but newspapers have to reflect real world usage.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Who the fsck does this guy think he is? He writes an article in October, 2000 declaring that e-mail is now officially (by him) designated 'e-mail'? Everyone I know of has always referred to electronic mail as 'e-mail'.
Also, the OP here claims that Tony Snow eliminated the hyphen in e-mail. In fact, it's just the opposite. He claims that he added it.
interwob
pornpipe
world wide time sink
lazy library
A blog I run for the wealth
"Intranet" is meaningless marketspeak which usually applies to a Web site.
The technical term "internet" applies to a collection of "networked networks".
Genius.
The regions are the East, the Midwest, the West, the South, and Texas.
So, it's all just part of some right wing smear campaingn huh? Wrong! Al Gore appeared on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer on March 9, 1999 and had the following exchange with Wolf Blitzer:
If you don't believe me, here's a link to the transcript so you can read it for yourself.
It looks like the ppl over at /. took your suggestion, just a few minutes after it was posted!
Actually, I'd say that it handles many protocols. Any of them can be routed over the shared backbone that is the "Internet".
I agree it should be cap'd though. As we're reffering to a single entity in the specific rather than a type of something in the generic. Tom rather than human and all that.
They're probably having trouble just because it's a dual purpose name. Ex: the guy in Batman is called "The Joker". He is also "a joker", as in the character from the card.
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
- "vey vey vey" - said in Austrian accent
- "triple-dub dot"
- "w-cube"
- "wubble-u"
- "web dot"
- "dub dub dub dot"
- "wubba dot"
- "wibble"
- "trip-dub"
- "dubya"
- "we-three"
- "wawawa"
- "sextuple u" or just "sex u"
- "wah wah wah"
- "wuhwuhwuhdot"
- "wubba wubba wubba"
I also remember seeing "triple-dub" in an old Wired magazine in the Jargon Watch section.Capitalization of proper nouns exists to increase comprehension. The Internet was named that way because it was unique. There were, agreed, many inter-networks, but the Internet was the "mother of all internets" as it aimed to connect them all into one global inter-network.
Corporations have intranets, but they may also have inter-networks with various vendors and customers -- these may not always be part of the Internet. So, as long as it is possible to have an internet that is not the Internet, the proper version should be capitalized.
Wired is merely hoping to be ahead of the curve in suggesting that it won't be long before all internets are part of the Internet -- and then it won't matter if the term is capitalized at all.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
At least, their decapitalizaton of Internet is. I can see the word "web" making sense as a lowercase word, but not Internet.
An internet (lower-case "i") is any computer network which connects several networks together. I.e., an "inter network". For example, if I disconnected the DSL line at home and then ran an Ethernet cable from my router to the neighbours', I'd have my own internet.
The Internet that we all know and love and use to download pr0n is the name of one such specific internet. Thus, we need the capitalization to distinguish between an internet and The Internet.
I think Wired just heard the old saw about the capitalists being the first against the wall and got confused.
I'm working for a Danish computer magazine (Komputer for alle), and am somewhat annoyed by this having happened already. But it's official, it's internet, not Internet etc.
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
Yes, they are, by definition.
eg TLD, TCP, PSTN, etc
Those are not acronyms. They are initialisms.
.. we call it teh Interweb!!!
...Porn will still be capitalized....
I like-a do-the cha-cha.
It has always been just the "internet."
The internet is to the 90's what rock-n-roll was to the 60's. Both were co-opted by money and power and left a bunch of kids bitter.
No, the internet didn't bring down tyrannies and usher in a wave of democracy and human rights over the world; your acid-fueled all-night air-guitar jam session at the Grateful Dead show didn't free Tibet either. Go figure. One thing Chairman Mao was right about is that political power comes from the barrel of a gun. You'll have to get off your ass and do something that involves substantial personal risk to you and your loved-ones in order to change things substantially.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
Someone posted a story on Slashdot about some magazine's decicion to spell a few words a little bit different in the future. Anyone interested?
Capital Punishment?
It'll always be
Internet, Net, Web & E-Mail
for me, just don't look right when you type email
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
They are just making an excuse so that ink can be saved in printing. 'i' vs 'I' less ink.
I think we should all send them feedback about that story.
Do they honestly think they can create new rules for the English language? I'm supposed to called the Web the "web" now? What's to differentiate that from a spider web? Idiotic.
Reading what you posted puts into context what Gore said, and proves that the Right exaggerated and even lied.
The last time I looked, it is unethical to take quotes out of context or to replace a persons words.
Chili Palmer: "E.g." means "for example". What I think you want to use is "i.e.".
Ray "Bones" Barboni: Bullshit! That's short for "ergo".
Chili Palmer: Ask your man.
Bodyguard: To the best of my knowledge, "e.g." means "for example".
Ray "Bones" Barboni: E.g., i.e., fuck you! The point is this: When I say "jump", you say "OK", okay?
Next thing you know they'll start using words lik emails. WTF people do you go to your mail box and get your mails? You've got mail, not "You've Got Mails" Has the entire world gone retarded!?!? How many people even remember how to spell OK? Hmm?
OKAY!
Not that I am some grammar master myself and I still catch myself using emails from time to time but for god sakes why not just use Dumbonics in all the articles. Better yet leet speak the whole damn thing. Try this:
|3!77 Gh8$ 4|\||) $3|\|4t0r |33ry \/\/!77 |)3p}{34t t3}{ t3rr0r!$ts |3y |34|!n' |)3|\/| P!3z!!!!
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
For the youngsters that didn't spend there lives at one end of a Renegade or Wildcat BBS across a 9600 modem that would be:
"Bill Gates and Senator Kelly will defeat the terrorists by bakin' dem pies"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
this is teh orginial funneh!!!1!11~1~eleventy-million
"Intranet" is meaningless marketspeak which usually applies to a Web site.
The technical term "internet" applies to a collection of "networked networks".
Genius.
Apparently you haven't made it into the real world yet. Intra means within. Inter means between. You have interstate roads (crossing boundaries) and intrastate roads (stay within the state). A corporations network that is not open to the public is an intranet. It is used only within (intra) the company.
intranet is most certainly not meaningless marketspeak.
This is just another example of how people only pay attention to the rules of language when it suits them. The "Internet" refers to the global network of unique interconnected IP networks. With the lower-case "internet," the meaning shifts to any network of unique interconnected IP networks. What happens the next time Wired has to have an article explaining how some multinational's internet connects to the Internet? With the global "Internet" not capitalized, the sentence loses all meaning.
As for "e-mail," it is quite simple. There is no contention that it is not a compound word made up of "electronic" and "mail." And as with any compound word, it needs a hyphen to separate them. Thus "e-mail."
People often complain how inconsistent the English language is in spelling and pronounciation. Most of the exceptions that drive people crazy are the result of decisions just like the one Wired made. While, unlike the French, there is no central voice of authority on what is and is not proper English, the accepted rules of the language are broken at our own peril.
Can we start using ethernet? We've done more lowercasing to laser and radar.
A lie is a lie, and you just told one.
Gore led the charge on getting the Internet funded. This seed capital was instrumental in its creation, and he rightly took credit for his significant role in its creation. He never claimed to have invented it, and claims to the contrary (originating from Declan McCullagh, the same guy who smeared the LiViD - "Linux DVD" project - and painted them out to be a bunch of DVD pirates, which got the MPAA interested and forced several developers to drop the project or face litigious reprisals) have been thoroughly debunked by a number of folks who did in fact take part in inventing the Internet, and have in fact spoken up on Al Gore's behalf.
It is Republican smear pure and simple, and has about as much basis in fact as Baby Bush's Weapons of Mass Destruction excuse for invading Iraq in a misguided effort to undue Daddy's defeat, ie none whatsoever.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I officially declare that ARPANET shall only be referred to as aRPAnET... bow down before the mystical powers of WIRED magazine!!!
Shouldn't it be Al Gore's choice?
It must be a slow news day, so they had to invent their own news.
/. will now be referred to as ?> from this point on
In Denmark, "internet" is supposed to be spelled with a small "i" and has been so for some time now (since 1999, I think). The proof is here.
:-)
Lots of people I meet in the Department of Computer Science don't know this so I've been miscorrected on several occasions. Even once at an exam where the external examiner gave us a knee-jerk reaction like the ones found in most comments here. Of course, I then pointed out that his reaction was outdated and did not correspond to the official Danish spelling. Luckily, it didn't seem to have any influence on the grades.
There are lots of redundant, silly posts here. The Danish authorities had good reasons for not capitalising the internet - as opposed to most people here, they are actually language expert (natural language, that is) who have studied these issues for years at a university. I think the primary reason was that the internet is becoming much like the telephone network or the road network, which you don't capitalise either. Yes, I know about Tanenbaum's explanation, but Tanenbaum is a computer scientist, not a linguist.
Next move...
... we should decapitalize "Google".
The post was moderated as funny, but I find it quite insightful. And in a way that has already happened, since google is spelled with a lower case g, when it is used as a verb.
because 'God' also starts with a capital. and i don't even believe in any god, the Internet is more like a religion to me :P
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
There is the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean... there are several oceans, which are proper names and thus capitalized when referred to.
There is one Earth, but many earthquakes.
There is one Internet; it is the "network of networks". One doesn't have "an internet", "some internets", but "the Internet". One might, however, have "an internet appliance", or "my internet training".
Proper nouns are capitalized. Taj Mahal. America. Roman Empire. Common Era.
Live simply, that others may simply live. -Gandhi
From the DHS web site:
o nt ent=233
"President Bush created the USA Freedom Corps in an effort to capture those opportunities and foster an American culture of service, citizenship and responsibility."
http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/display?theme=63&c
So by your interpretation, the Dems can claim that George Bush actually created these people in some kind of laboratory?
Of course not. So why does everyone try to imply that Al Gore was taking credit for inventing the underlying technology that runs the web?
But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most... and that is the indifference of good men.
There is also "one phone", over time the novelty of even the biggest, most complex machine (the thrust to develop Unix) ever built by mankind becomes commonplace and loses it proper name.
Allot of people have and carry a 'phone'. I can just see the day when people refer to their $250 terminal as an 'internet'. What next, a 'unix'?
Internet happens to be the collectively agreed on proper name of the worlds largest internet. A type of network. This is a bit like naming a collective bargaining agreement The Collective Bargaining Agreement.
Or perhaps more like calling the caucasian race "The Race" it's not the only race, even though it's name would imply so. I myself us an alternate race every day.... and an alternate internet every once an while too.
...that place is just owned by someone whose parents were very cruel to them :)
I haven't been over my grammatical rules since Grade 1 (1986) -- but don't you capitalize all Noun's in a sentence. Person, Place, or Thing.
Is this a Canadian specific rule?
Not that the "Internet" should be capitalized, but -- the article explains, "Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was."
I'm confused.
Ace
...so I use MACs all the time. What are you talking about?
No comment.
I don't understand why we should focus on the proper capitalization of the word "internet" when we could be spending our time trying to help get Dick Cheney some more money. Cheney is running low and he needs our support. Please send a check for as much money as you can made out to "Halliburton Inc". Think technology, people, think technology.
I've always preferred to call it shub-internet. I sacrifice my bits to it daily.
This article brings to mind a sort of question that has been bugging me for quite a while. My biology teacher explained that, in the US, Calorie (capital C) is actually a kilo-calorie, while a calorie (little c) is just one calorie. Now what happens if I want to use calorie (reffering to just one..not 1000) at the beginning of a sentence?
Do I capitalize it?..no..that would make it 1000 calories.
Do I leave it uncapitalized? No..that would break grammar rules..
It just doesnt make any sense!
The following is the response that I have submitted to the Wired author in question (Tony Long).
Dear Sir,
I have no idea from whence you derive the rationale for your decision; the argument seems specious and illogical. The last time I checked, proper nouns such as the names of persons or companies were capitalised in English, and not just auf Deutsch.
The word 'Web' is an abbreviation of 'World Wide Web', which is just as much a proper noun as 'The New York Times' or Wired News'. It is also represented by an actual administrative body, the World Wide Web Consortium.
'Internet' is likewise a proper noun, and as 'Net' is simply an abbreviated rendering, it deserves the retention of the capital. Were it not for the existence of such regulatory bodies as the Internet Engineering Task Force, your argument might have some validity.
Further, your contention that the Internet is simply a new means of communication ignores the fact that it is regulated by a handful global organisations, unlike your other examples (radio, television, etceteras). Further, you may note that in cases where other media are addressed properly, capitals are, in fact, used; e.g., the spelling of Radio 1 (the BBC station).
To use another argument, examine the name of your own organisation. The term 'wired' has entered the English language as a verb indicating an electrical or digital connexion. It is frequently used in reference to the Internet. Should, then, the name of your own company be referred to as 'wired news' since the word has such a generalised connotation within the context in which you operate?
In a similar vein, the orthographical and etymological spellings for the following words should be retained: 'e-mail', 'on-line', and 'log-in'/'log-on'. Arguments based upon the ubiquity of incorrect spelling have no legitimacy as far as I am concerned. Would you have us all adopting the spellings 'thru', 'nite', and 'donut'?
Regards,
#########
+++++++
"Look, dear, it's a crazy hairy scary man!"
"You have two cat's...what? Two cat's ears?")
I hate to be a stickler, but there's nothing you could put after "two cat's" that would make sense. Posessive plural gets the apostrophe after the "s".
So you have two cats'... pajamas, perhaps?
Benjamin
"Foremost among them is the insertion of the hyphen into "e-mail." It's a decision -- made for both practical and symbolic reasons -- that has ruffled some feathers around here, and will no doubt ruffle a few out there. But more on that later. First, let's consider the justification for upsetting the ritual tranquility of your morning latté."
Correction for the poster. Unless Wired reversed their decision... they decided to INSERT the hyphen not take it away. Second, Internet should always be capitalized when referencing the Internet. Since it is a proper noun. But then again I'm horrible at English grammer...
What do I know anyway?
The OED lists insecure in the sense of 'Unsafe, exposed to danger' with references going back to 1654.
Exactly. If they had just checked the dictionary before trying to redefine words on their own they would know that the words internet and Internet are not the same.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Please write them and complain... I did:
I'll agree with most Slashdot posters on this. Your thinking is muddled:
"(Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)"
followed by:
"But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television."
If "World Wide Web" deserves capitalization, then it is almost a tautology that "The Internet" does, since in fact the former is nothing more than a colloquialism of the later. It would have been much more correct for you to say you are never going to use the term "World Wide Web" at all, and instead standardize on "The Internet" (or just "Internet") as do people who know what they are talking about.
Note the distinction between "Internet", that single network based on TCP/IP and related protocols allowing everyone in the world to be connected, and "intranet", or "internet" meaning any network set up using those protocols that allow one or more computers to communicate. The difference is significant.
Your examples show your ignorance. "television" or "radio" can refer to many things. A device, and entertainment industry, a form of broadcast spectrum, or a cable signal. Those words would be more comparable to "network", "networking" which I agree should not be capitalized.
Your move, carried to its logical conclusion would mean that the name of your publication should be changed to just "wired" since that word means "connected up with a wire". See the difference now?
The internet is no longer the Internet, but a few million networks that were once based on what would require the proper name. The Internet was created 10-15 years ago. The internet is what we have today.
Until there is more than one, and you can have a group of internets (weird to even say), there will be only one Internet. I don't give a damn how ubiquitous it is. There's only one White House, but using this same logic, we should now call it simply the white house.
Morons.
On a similar vein, do you remember when these networks weren't referred to as "the" first?
FidoNet was FidoNet, ARPANET was ARPANET, and InterNet was InterNet, and not "The Internet".
I was aghast the first time I heard Dan Rather on the news describing "The Internet" in 1994. I was thinking, "News corespondent! Improper English!! Ahhhh!!!".
Does anyone else notice that Martin Sergeant from TechTV still calls it by it's proper name, "InterNet", and not "The Internet"?
The Internet (as opposed to an internet, which refers to any interconnected group of networks) is a specific internet, thus it is a proper noun, thus it must be capitalized.
Wired isn't considered an authority on grammar for a a reason. But they are just furthering a stereotype that geeks cannot use the English language properly.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Most of the time, I try to be exacting about spelling and grammar. I fully spell words in text messages, and I punctuate where appropriate.
At the same time, I am quite accepting about the way other people use the language and don't point out errors if the author's intent is still clear.
I do have some pet hates when it comes to grammar, such as incorrect usage of "begs the question", or overusage of the word "get". Until now, the "internet" has not been on that list.
However, if Wired has succumbed to the commercial world to the extent that it believes only trademarks and brandnames are truly deserving the consideration of the shift key, then let the battle lines be drawn!
"True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important."
This is the basis of their argument? Some idiots who misuse capital letters also inadvertently spell Internet correctly: therefore we should intentionally misspell it ourselves in order to disassociate ourselves from them.
What complete and utter bollocks. Bollix, if you prefer. While I can understand Wired wanting to distance themselves from marketing and political people, they have no need to do so with techies - their articles do that all by themselves.
Are the editors in Wired really that contemptuous?
That they claim there was never any reason to capitalise it in the first place reflects their disregard for the heritage of the Internet. That they view it as "just another medium for delivering and receiving information" overlooks the armies of network engineers, and the tonnes of switches, routers, and cabling required to keep the Internet alive. If we unplugged all the routers, there would be no Internet. I'm pretty sure there would still be an internet or two though.
Perhaps because you cannot catch a bus to the Internet you hesitate to use the shift key. I, however, have definately stubbed my toe on a portion of it before, and that for me is reason enough to capitalise it.
Slightly unrelated, I usually write "Thank god", except when I want to remind the Christians that there may be more than one.
Hmm. Theology meets regexp(3)... think its time for a new sig... (God)?|(god)*|(god)+
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Sci-fi writers have been doing this for years. Wired was behind the times.
It's like the ocean. The ocean is big, powerful, and impressive, and we owe our existence to it, but even still, we don't call it the Ocean, merely the ocean.
What "the ocean" are you talking about? You mean the disparate bodies of water which taken together are not considered an ocean but oceans? Oh, I see, you really meant the Pacific Ocean. Or was that the Indian Ocean, or the Atlantic Ocean . . . .
Around 1989, I noticed the Maritz Travel rep at my office had all kinds of literature with "Internet (R)(TM)" printed on it. They were doing a huge marketing campaign for their network.
Well I, being the geek, confronted the travel rep about this, asking how they can possibly claim a trademark for their network, when "internet" already was common usage for a public network.
Stupid travel rep didn't have a clue what I was talking about, and letters to managers in that company went unanswered.
I think there is a potential problem here. Maritz Travel could conceivably prevail in a trademark dispute over the word "Internet" applied to a computer network.
Nobody cared in 1989, and I doubt anyone cares today. They won't care until someone wins a lawsuit over it, I suppose.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Must be nice to have the time to worry about whether it should be the "I"nternet or the "i"nternet, "e-"mail or "e"mail. Don't people have "B"etter things to do with their lives?
I "G"uess not.....
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Vinton Cerf (generally acknowledged as the father of the Internet):
More here: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wigginexplanation
Now, in Andrew Tanembaum's "Computer Networks, Third Edition" is an interesting part in chapter one that says:
(...) A collection of interconnected networks is called an internetwork or just internet.
(Here goes a paragraph explainin what a WAN is, snipped for brevity)
To avoid confusion, please note that the word "internet" will always be used in this book in a generic sense. In contrastm the Internet (note uppercase I) means a specific worldwide internet that is widely used to connect universities, government offices (....)
So there IS a reason to capitalize "Internet". Namely to indicate it is the internet we all know, instead of a minor internet somewhere else.
These two terms are also defined in RFC-1983 (Internet users' glossary), as defined in Tanembaum's book, with that distinction especially indicated. Sure, RFC-1983 is marked as "Informational", but it's still a RFC, and it shows a valid reason for the capitalization.
Clearly someone at Wired did not do the necesary research.
GPG 0x1B479C78
Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars... Uh oh.
The moon and the sun are also (usually) rendered with lowercase letters. That always struck me as odd. Is Earth the name of the planet or not? Can a Mars probe dig into the earth of the red planet?
Do sci-fi writers end up using names like Sol, Terra, and Luna just so they capitalize them consistently along with the names of the rest of the celestial bodies?
i rarely capitalize anything cept fer may be acronymns and the official two letter initials the post office uses for the fifty states. not even the first letter of the first word of a sentence get's capitalized by me. hardly defining living on the edge, but then i really don't care.
Serenity now, insanity later.
I remember when I could use the plural form of the word and nobody would look at me funny.
I have a presence on several internets, and it has always been convenient to be able to refer to the current internet I am working with as "the internet" and distinguish that from the public internet by using the traditional form of capitalizing the 'I' when we are talking about the public, global internet.
If WIRED is successful in propagating this new convention, then I will have to start calling it The Globally Public Internet to distinguish it from all the other internets I use.
I hate editors. They are a lot less useful most times than they are supposed to be.
jhw
Your problem is that you think people mean it in a generic sense. If I invented the refrigerator and built a huge one called the Regrigerator then it would be a proper noun. Yes, other people could build refrigerators but if you want to speak about the big one you say the Refrigerator. It's a name... that's the name they gave it more than twenty years ago. It just also happens to be a generic term for the kind of thing it is. Kind of like windows vs. Windows, john vs. John apple vs. Apple. They mean different things -- the capital letter is there for a reason.
One word...
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
English
They were going to decapitalise 'Microsoft', but in the end capitalism was just too much a part of their image.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
What next, will they also stop capitalizing "usenet" and "web browser" and
"service provider" and "post office" and "bank" and "grep" and "sort"?
If internet were a proper noun, there would be other worldwide communications
networks with other names. (No, don't say the phone network; phones and
web browsers transmit their data over the *same* network, they just do it
rather differently.) TCP/IP over avian carriers never really caught on,
for some strange reason, so we only have one internet. But if we had did
have two distinct internetworks, they'd both be internets.
usenet is an edge case -- it really probably ought to be a proper noun, but
it comes out of Unix culture, so it's lowercase as a matter of case-sensitive
spelling, even at the beginning of a sentence, like grep and sort (when sort
is used as a proper noun -- when sort is used as a verb or a common noun it's
from standard English and is capitalized according to the normal rules).
And yes, this is consistent with the normal rules of English, in the sense
that the normal rules of English allow for exceptions based on sepcial rules
pertaining to a given etymological source. There are also many English
words that are CamelCased -- and I don't just mean computer words, either --
because of their etymology or the particulars of the field they come from.
Similarly, words derived from foreign languages often form their plurals
specially or are pronounced specially according to the rules of the source
language or field, e.g., pianos and filet, respectively. case-sensitive
spellings from Unix culture are consistent with this.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
"I'm really enjoying this so-called...iced cream"
-- Mr. Burns
The Internet is a network we all love, but the internet is the network, plus the culture, plus the companies, plus the traditions, plus the lifestyle, etc., etc.
So when talking about the network, we should capitalize: "DNS system is the cornerstone of the Internet". When talking about everything else, we shouldn't: "Kids on the internet have lousy spelling."
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Maybe your grocer means "Fresh Fish is For Sale"! ;)
Is that wired's great story of 2004???
You don't say "The Refrigerator is broken and the Food is bad, so let's jump in the Car and go to the Restaurant" do you?
I do, after throwing all the spoiled stuff out and phoning the insurance company.
home
How about we introduce a shotgun to the next doofus that uses the phrase "information superhighway"? Nah, bad idea... we'd run out of politicians way too fast.
It was the US Navy that got it wrong. Non-secure isn't a word. If a line is not protected from evesdropping, the correct term would be "unsecured".
fish and pipes
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According to Tanenbaum's book 'Computer Networks' the Internet is an example of an internet. An internet is a network linking together two smaller networks.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
While he may have contributed on a political level to its creation, that's not what he said
Oh, but that was what he said! You quoted him yourself!
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
He is clearly talking about his contributions in the capacity of a US senator, not as a network engineer. Anyone who intentionally misreads this statement to mean that Al Gore is claiming to have had a night job working on Internet infrastructure is being intellectually dishonest.
So verb is a noun? Who would have noun...
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."