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

Internet != internet

[ooloorie]

There are many possible "internets", networks of interlinked networks. The "Internet" is one of them, by far the largest. That is, "Internet" is a proper noun, in the same way that "Bill", "Associated Press", and "Monica" are.

Re:Internet != internet

[Dr. Evil]

Although "internet" is not common, I strongly disagree that the common use is not as a proper noun. The Internet is a place, much like Europe, Mars, Rome, or whatever.

When speaking of multiple linked networks, I speak of intranets or private networks, but if something is on the Internet, it's addressable in one, clear, named, identifiable space, and that space is called the Internet.

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

[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

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.

Modish but foolish

[Archtech]

I can see how this decision fits in with modern fashion. The whole idea of a proper noun seems to grate - perhaps it clashes with the pervasive inverted snobbery of our culture. Many people's forum handles lower-case ordinary names, subtly suggesting that they are more sophisticated than old-fashioned upper-cased names.

As others have pointed out, there is in practice only one Internet: so it should be "the Internet". There are of course many intranets, and you can talk about different partial internets; but if they are not part of the Internet, the usage is merely confusing; and if they are part of the Internet, why use the same name for the whole and a part of it?

As for the Web, it was invented and freely given to the world by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN. Sir Tim has always emphasized that it should be both unique and world-wide, hence the proper name "the World Wide Web".

Here is his authoritative explanation:

Q: How in fact do you spell World Wide Web?

A: It should be spelled as three separate words, so that its acronym is three separate "W"s. There are no hyphens. Yes, I know that it has in some places been spelled with a hyphen but the official way is without. Yes, I know that "worldwide" is a word in the dictionary, but World Wide Web is three words.

I use "Web" with a capital W to indicate that it is an abbreviation for "World Wide Web". Hence, "What a tangled web he wove on his Web site!".

Often, WWW is written and read as W3, which is quicker to say. In particular, the World Wide Web consortium is W3C, never WWWC.

Q: Why did you call it WWW?

A: Looking for a name for a global hypertext system, an essential element I wanted to stress was its decentralized form allowing anything to link to anything. This form is mathematically a graph, or web. It was designed to be global of course. (I had noticed that projects find it useful to have a signature letter, as the Zebra project at CERN which started all its variables with "Z". In fact by the time I had decided on WWW, I had written enough code using global variables starting with "HT" for hypertext that W wasn't used for that.). Alternatives I considered were "Mine of information" ("Moi", c'est un peu egoiste) and "The Information Mine ("Tim", even more egocentric!), and "Information Mesh" (too like "Mess" though its ability to describe a mess was a requirement!). Karen Sollins at MIT now has a Mesh project.

https://www.w3.org/People/Bern...

Re:AP, of course they're wrong

[Hognoxious]

"A internet"

I don't think there's any point in reading the rest, is there?

Re: fascists

[Xenx]

All language is just a collection of common usage. It follows its own evolutionary process. What was correct in the past or present will not, and should not, necessarily be correct in the future. The point of language is to attempt clear communication between people. Correct/incorrect usage should be derived from how it's used by the populace, not forced upon the populace.

Re: fascists

[PopeRatzo]

Agreed. They should stick to what is correct in order to at least demonstrate correctness. But what they are saying is that because people abuse the language, they should too, because the abuse becomes "common usage".

It's not about correctness. It's about meaning. The internet isn't a proper noun any more. You wouldn't capitalize the "Phone System", would you? It just isn't a formal name. You wouldn't capitalize the "Interstate Highway System".

And the "Web" is rarely used any more at all. When something becomes that ubiquitous, it doesn't need formality.

STYLE ALERT

[fyngyrz]

Don't capitalize "associated press" any longer. As this organization has been around for some time now and it is common to see these words associated with non-news items, we have now lost interest in them and they are no longer to be considered proper nouns.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, denizens of the Internet. If you'd like to learn more, you are welcome to visit my Web site.