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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".
And this is News? err sorry. news
Can we please make that one word, like most of those who actually build them do?
I've been really annoyed by things like MS-Word that would always automatically capitalize the "i" in "internet". 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.
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
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
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.
eh hem...
"The internet is a communications tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another."
Great movie.
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.
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.
people stop writing WEB when it's not an acronym or abbreviation.
I suppose people using "/." have been doing this all along, else it would be "?."
=Smidge=
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.
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 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.
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.
(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
Another one that always bothered me..."worldwide" is one word. So it should be Worldwide Web...as in ww.slashdot.org and not www.
I'll never understand why this pathetic lameness is still considered funny for so long after the Republicans started exaggerating what Gore actually said. Is it some sort of self-mocking humor by the people dumb enough to repeat it?
cummings
would
be
proud
bp
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"
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".
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.
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.
(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
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
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
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.
Your conclusion is valid but your reasoning is backwards.
The Internet is a proper noun referring to the worldwide public internet managed by the IETF. It is to distinguish this specific internet named the Internet from the private and restricted access internets that it should remain capitalised.
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.
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
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
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.
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").
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.
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
Capital Punishment?
"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.
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