AP Style Alert: Don't Capitalize Internet and Web Anymore (poynter.org)

Saturday the Associated Press announced they're changing the rules in their influential stylebook: the words "internet" and "web" should no longer be capitalized. "The changes reflect a growing trend toward lowercasing both words," their standards editor told Poynter.org, pointing out that both words "have become generic terms." Words tend to be lowercased as their usage becomes more common, and Poynter.org points out that "In 2011, e-mail became email... in 2010, Web site became website." In 2013 the AP even revised their usage of the term "illegal immigration," advising "use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant," as part of a push towards'ridding the Stylebook of labels."

Comments

I'm good with this.

[ScentCone]

It never made sense, to me, to capitalize "web" or "internet," so this is just finally getting it right. I do find "website" to be silly, though. It makes no more sense than "constructionsite" or "landingsite" or "accidentsite."

And why is "illegal immigrant" incorrect? Yes, the act of immigrating illegally is illegal. It puts the person who commits that crime into the condition of being an illegal immigrant. If someone is squatting in a house where they don't have permission to live, they are illegally residing in that house - they are illegal residents of that house. It's not like there's any semantic confusion on the subject. We talk very reasonably about people being legal residents, visa-holding travelers, etc. A phrase which defines their nature and status is perfectly reasonable. Someone either is, or is not an immigrant, and either is or is not such in keeping with immigration law. Immigration is a process 100% defined by law. One is either doing it legally, or not. Their status after doing it is within the provisions of the law, or outside it. They are legally residing in the country, or they are doing so illegally.

Re:I'm good with this.

[kenai_alpenglow]

Are you a citizen? If not, you are an alien. (I'm ignoring the category of US Persons, who can be either a citizen or not--this is irrelevant to the discussion.) That's neither good nor bad, just a fact. Are you here legally? If not, you are here illegally. That's a fact, neither good nor bad. If you a non-citizen (alien) who is here illegally, that makes you an illegal alien. That's a fact, neither good nor bad. I've been in a situation where I could have been considered to have crossed the border illegally (in a military jet, no less); that maked me an illegal alien during that time frame--doesn't bother me. If you take offense at it (and it's true, of course), that's the same as taking offense at being called a thief when you're caught with your hand in the cookie jar (or holding the diamond necklace as you're caught fleeing the jewelry store). It's a fact, neither good nor bad. GET OVER THIS PC NONSENSE!

Re:I'm good with this.

[Imrik]

I like the German practice of capitalizing all nouns, can we adopt it as the standard instead of this movement away from capitalizing proper nouns?

Re:I'm good with this.

[ScentCone]

Yeah, we don't want to label people. Words like "citizen" dehumanize, right? Or "taxpayer." That's awful. It it just makes the half of the country's population that does pay income taxes sounds like mere beasts of burden for the half that pay no income taxes.

Or maybe, just possibly, the point is that we use such labels when they are contextually useful? When we're talking about choices of haircut, immigration status isn't particularly meaningful. When we're talking about whether or not someone is benefiting from their presence in the US without doing the things that other law-abiding people did in order to get those benefits, mentioning the fact that they are in the country illegally is completely appropriate.

Why SHOULD someone who's decided to skip the line and avoid the legal requirements of proper immigration get empathy from those they're cheating? What's lazy and stereotyping about calling someone what they actually are, when the context of the discussion directly relates to their lawbreaking and what they get out of their choice to be such ... and what other people who choose to follow the law must do, in contrast?

You've got your laziness label aimed at the wrong problem. The laziness comes from confusing race with culture, or confusing culture with personal choices to act. Those who use a label to describe the legal circumstances that someone deliberately chose to put themselves in aren't talking race, or culture, or gender or any of the other lights-progressives'-hair-on-fire PC third-rail topics. They're talking about a CHOICE people have made to break the law. Just like when they choose to hold up a liquor store or steal a car or profit from inside trading. That doesn't make them "other" in any sense other than what the phrase explicitly addresses: their choice to obey the law, or not. Have you chosen to break federal immigration law? No? Then you are in one category, and the people who HAVE chosen to break those laws are in another.

The real intellectual laziness and moral cowardice comes from trying to blur that distinction in order to avoid the personal discomfort of actually identifying someone's decision to break the law for what it is. The real question is: why does someone become uncomfortable identifying someone's actions for what they demonstrably are? Usually, it's because they're too craven to come out and say what they really want: open borders and a generous welfare state for anyone who shows up. Those who want that in the US are several years too slow watching how those policies have been turning out elsewhere.

Re:I'm good with this.

[AthanasiusKircher]

As it said in the summary, referring to illegal immigration rather than illegal immigrants is an effort to avoid labeling people. While it is a technically correct description, there is more to language that technical specificity and precision. When discussing politically and emotionally charged subjects, labeling people as "a something or other", especially when referring to a group of people serves to subconsciously dehumanise them in the minds of the reader. Labelling people enables a cognitive shortcut that prunes any human attributes outside those implied by the label, and transforms them from "a human like me with complex motivitations and someone whom i could empathise with" to "outsiders that aren't like me and could be a threat and doesn't deserve any empathy, because all they are is [whatever label]".

While on some level I agree with you, I think you can take this too far. It's one thing to use a word for bigoted purposes and stereotypes, but there are sometimes that "specificity and precision" you mention is relevant.

There are some people who seem to use the word "illegal immigrant" as a kind of code for "lazy Mexican." In that case, I completely agree with your objections. If you're commenting on some people you see sitting over on the other side of the bar, and just refer to them casually as "illegal immigrants" (often without proof), then yes, you may be characterizing the person inaccurately. Even if you know their status, making reference to it for no reason often tends to associate it with various stereotypes among certain groups of people.

On the other hand, there are numerous places where the "illegal" status is relevant. People who immigrate illegally don't have sufficient documentation often to apply for jobs, they can't get various social services, etc. Thus, if you're referring to a group of people's work status, it's perfectly legitimate (and accurate) to note the "illegal immigrant" status.

It's important to careful avoid promoting lazy stereotyping, even on as seemingly innocuous a level as carefully avoiding some terminology because we are all chimps with buggy reasoning software installed, and we need to work around the bugs as much as possible.

Again, I agree with you that language can be used to reinforce stereotypes. But the specific problem with the term "illegal immigrant" seems to be that people want to put it on the euphemism treadmill. I've heard public speakers insist in interviews on using the term "undocumented worker" for all illegal immigrants, even if they didn't have jobs. They refused to utter the term "illegal immigrant" even though in some cases it would have been the most accurate term to use. The process here is to combat the bigoted equation of "illegal immigrant" = code for "lazy Mexican" by proposing a term like "undocumented worker" which sounds less objectionable ("undocumented," he just didn't file the right paperwork) and emphasizes the hard "work" many of them may do.

That is perhaps a noble idea to fight a stereotype, but I do NOT agree with it when it actually results in inaccuracies. In some contexts, "illegal immigrant" is the most accurate description available to refer to a specific group of people, i.e., those who immigrated illegally. When that immigration status is relevant for some reason, the term is not inaccurate.

But what some people are doing is trying to fight stereotypes by word replacement (the "euphemism treadmill"), which never really works. See the history of words for black people in the U.S.:

(1) In the mid-1800s, the word "black" was considered derogatory and inaccurate -- since most people have skin with various shades of brown, not literally black -- so there was an argument to use the term "colored" people instead.

(2) In the early 1900s, some black scholars objected to the term "colored" since it was sometimes used disparagingly and co

Or Headline Words !

[swell]

Doesn't that look stupid. Why would those words have capitals? They are not names of anything that require a capital, they are just ordinary words. Why can't Slashdot get in step with the majority of publishers in this century who eschew excess capitalization in headlines? Such headlines can be very confusing, but worse- they smack of the hype that publishers in the 19th century thought necessary.

Re: Internet != internet

[fruviad]

It is common to see people inappropriately use "to" when they mean "too".

It is common to see people inappropriately use "it's" when they mean "its".

Common != Correct

Re: Internet != internet

[Tomahawk]

In this case, no. Common usage is incorrect. The 2 terms "internet" and "Internet" have specific meanings. In this case, the majority are not aware of the differences as they are technical in nature. Hence the "common usage". If AP did their research and talked to a few people in the field, they would then know the reasons they shouldn't change. "Common usage" is not always correct, is just common. It means most people are wrong. Instead of following them, they should try to educate them, or we'll end up with more "literally" face-palms in the language. Educate. Steer the language. Don't just follow common usage because teenage girls use "literally" in an ironic sense without knowing (or without knowing what ironic means).

Re:Internet != internet

[AthanasiusKircher]

When speaking, there is no difference an upper and lower case letter. It's rare to hear anyone complain that the spoken form of some sentence is more ambiguous or otherwise problematic than the written equivalent.

Writing lacks all sorts of expressive capabilities that can be conveyed through speech. Cues like subtle rises and falls around words, highlighting a word through volume or pitch, etc. can all help us parse where a sentence begins/ends or to know that a specific word is referring to a person rather than a common noun with the same sound. We don't have those cues in writing.

Why we still use capital letters?

I'm not really a linguist, but you might as well ask why we still use punctuation, or why we put spaces between words, or why we spell things in the ridiculous mess that is English-language spelling. They are conventions. Language is about communication, and effective communication requires common understanding -- which relies on convention. We learn to parse patterns based on those conventions. When those conventions change suddenly, it's more difficult for people familiar with them to parse things, and the communication is less effective.

That's the very broad general answer for all such things.

For the specific notion of capital letters, they are used (and have been used for over a millennium) as cues for parsing language. They occur at the beginning of sentences, which is a signal to parse a new phrase. They occur for proper names (people, countries, specific places, etc.), which is a cue to differentiate a word from any "common noun" associations. They therefore provide a shade of meaning that is different in many contexts. Often such meanings could be determined from context too, but the capital letter is a shortcut that immediately identifies the word as a "proper" noun, which means it generally falls into a few specific categories. In cases of ambiguity, someone parsing a sentence can immediately know that the word is a person, or a specific place, or whatever.

Some other languages have other conventions for capitals that make this parsing role exceptionally clear -- see German, for example, where ALL nouns are capitalized. Is it "necessary"? Obviously other languages do without it. But for Germans, that is a grammatical cue to the function of the word in a sentence. In English, capitals also provide such cues, just for specific types of nouns, rather than all of them. But the meaning is still helpful in many contexts.

Could we do without capital letters? Of course. Ancient languages often did, and various scripts around the world don't really have an equivalent. But again, it's kind of like asking why we put spaces between words. Youcanreadasentencewithoutthem,andit'softenstraightforwardtoparseasentence. But the spaces make it quicker in some circumstances with less cognitive load for those familiar with the convention.

They seem like an unnecessary relic (another example: the difference between ',' and ';') that we should be working to simplify out of the written form of our language.

Commas and semicolons are completely different punctuation marks, and they imply completely different relationships about the words or phrases around them. (The one case of similar usage is in lists that are subdivided, but this isn't a particularly common use case. Even there, the point is that the semicolon helps delineate between comma-delineated lists of items.)

Could we eliminate semicolons? Of course, but then we'd lose some subtle meaning and parsing possibilities. We could eliminate punctuation altogether too, but it would be even worse.

We might as well ask why we have dozens of words for different shades of "blue." Why not just call them all "blue"? Well, in some contexts it helps to clarify things, and sometimes that lack of ambiguity can assist in parsing what someone else means (e.g., when trying to locate an item on