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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.
Google is a brand name. It should always be capitalized, just like Kleenex and Xerox. The fact that common usage has adapted these trademarked names as generic nouns doesn't change the fact that proper English dictates that they should be capitalized.
The internet was never a brand name, thus, there was no need to capitalize it.
GMD
watch this
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 $?
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.
I think the constant use of the definite article "The" hooked most people into the capital "I". It's The Internet. There are not multiple internets (secure military and financial nets notwithstanding), there is only The Internet. There is no internet but THE Internet and Wired magazine is probably not its prophet, though I'm sure they like to think they are.
Probably has a lot to do with non-tech people not understanding the difference between a WAN and a LAN, and just referring to everything as an "internet".
Think I need to cut back on my coffee consumption.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Another one that always bothered me..."worldwide" is one word. So it should be Worldwide Web...as in ww.slashdot.org and not www.
At one time, there was only one internet and it was called the Internet.
"internet" is just a network that connects two other networks (intranets, for example), much like an interstate hiway is a hiway that goes between (at least) two states here in the USA. I have an internet connecting my home network with my ISP.
The Internet is a specific entity, namely, the one you are using to read this post, most likely. There is only one of it.
Can't you people see that it's a Capitonym
RTFW (read the fscking Wiki)
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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.
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"
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.
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
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
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.
I've never capitalized 'internet' but my word processors always want me to. Hopefully this is changed soon also.
The parent was wrong. So are you.
Internet is no more a proper noun than is car, refrigerator, restaurant.
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?
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.
I think it was a rather logical reason: if there is only one instance of this thing and another one is impossible or unlikely to exist now or in the near future, it should be written capitalized.
So as long as logic prohibits the simultaneos existence of maybe two "internets", it will be written with a capital "I". Same thing goes for God - only one instance, never will be a second one beside it/Him or whatever. Applies to trademarks, as they denote a certain brand that is "unique" in some way. Even if there could be two "Fords" or three "Cadillacs", it's not possible to have a "Ford" that doesn't come from "Ford", whatever good or bad the connotation may be that comes with that name. Tautology aside, I bet that even goes for "I", because there's only one "I" for me. "You" is often not capitalized like it was in the past, but in formal letters it still is.
Strange thing I as a German has to tell you, because in German, all nouns are always written capitalized. (Hmm, all countries and languages are also written with capital letters in English. Same property: they are unique, too).
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This is exactly right. Because, really, if someone says "internet," is there going to be any other one that you're going to confuse it with?
"Each time you smile, it'll only last awhile. Life may be scary, but it's only temporary."
Ironically enough, the Midwest is not even close to being the middle of the west -- the origins date to colonial times, so the Midwest is actually in the northeastern part of the United States.
May we never see th
I had the good fortune of meeting and speaking with Dr. Vinton Cerf, widely regarded as the co-founder of '[I|i]nternet'. He makes a point of NEVER calling it 'the Internet' (in speech anyways...I haven't read many of his papers), but instead indicates that it should be called 'Internet'. Pardon me while I take the side of one of the network's founders.
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.
You are attempting to pick words apart to prove what they actually mean. It'd be nice if languages were logical and that approach actually worked, but it doesn't.
"Anti-semitic", for example, doesn't mean "against semites", but "hating Jews", since that's what it was first coined for. "Homophobia" is not "fear of similarity" but of "homosexuals".
First there were networks. Then there was "internet protocol", which could be used to connect networks. Then there was "internet", any set of 2 or more hosts using internet protocol. Only 15 years later was "intranet" coined, to mean a LAN using application protocols popularized on the Internet.
An interesting point that I have considered many times.
Those that want to keep "God" in the U.S. pledge, etc., claim that "God" is a generic term for a spiritual, not religious concept; and, therefore, does not endorse any specific religion. Bill O'Reilly holds this belief, as do many conservatives.
Those that want to remove "God" from the U.S. pledge, etc., claim that "God" is the proper name for the Judeo-Christian supreme being and represents an endorsement by the U.S. government of a specific religion. Which is, of course, unconstitutional.
My suggestion to mend this dilema has always been to uncapitalize "God" thereby removing the association with the Judeo-Christian supreme being. Hell, I'd even be for making it plural... One nation, under gods, indivisible...
My unrealistic suggestion is to change "God" to "the laws of physics".
Part of this problem can be blamed on the rising population of "tweens" , "pre-teens" and "teeny-boppers". While I'm not blaming them for it, they are a large chunk of it. Everytime you see a movie, tv show or similar with one of these types in it, they drop their "special catch phrases". e.g: "Oh, lets go surf the web and check our email!" or "Lets go read a zine on the net yo!" To me, these people are damn annoying, and should be shot. And theres also the people who try to jump on the bandwagon, and make somethings disgracefull. i.e: jocks making zines, saying stupid things AND STILL calling nerds nerds because they use a computer. The world is in a decline.
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"?
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"
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"?
Well, what about k.d. lang? ;-)
But to be more literary: If you ask me, it might as well be "e.e.", as it is in line with his style.
Using lowercase (back then at least) was a revolt against form. For instance the Swedish anthology "fem unga" from 1928 (I live in Sweden, so my reference frame is much thereafter) is considered very much the herald of the modernist generation of litterature in Sweden. (Although Strindberg was first, but he was ahead of his time)
Anyway, the cover of "fem unga" has all names in all-lowercase.
(One of the debuting authors in "fem unga" was Harry Martinson, who won the Nobel prize in litterature some 44 years later)
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.