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Internet, Web Enjoy One Final Day As Proper Nouns (go.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Internet and Web will be downgraded to "internet" and "web" tomorrow with the new edition of the AP Stylebook. Therefore, today marks their last day as proper nouns. The AP Stylebook is a manual that many journalists follow, offering a comprehensive guide to the usage of words, style, spelling and punctuation. "The argument for lowercasing Internet is that is has become wholly generic, like electricity and the telephone. It never was trademarked and is not based on any proper noun," writes Tom Kent, AP Standards Editor. "The best reason for capitalizing it in the past may have been that the term was new. At one point, we understand, 'Phonograph' was capitalized." The two names will join the likes of website (formerly Web site) and email (formerly e-mail).
Nobody talks about any other internet when they say Internet. It's a proper place name just as much as Asia.
Exactly. There is and always has been a reason to distinguish between the general concept of an internet, and the specific, publicly-accessible, globe-spanning Internet.
However, I guess that it is very rare for AP articles to need to draw that distinction. Whatever. I'm going to continue using "Internet" to refer to the Internet and "internet" to refer to the concept of an internet.
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"If the people at the AP are so clueless..."
It's worse than that. There are many "Style" guides out there, the AP guide is supposed to be for general Journalism with a specific audience- it's the "Associated Press" after all. Grab a story off of the teletype, change a few words, and send it out to be typeset. Reuters and UPI have their own Style guides, and they can be very catty about capitalization, commas, abbreviations, and the like.
At the Lab, we had several style guides, again meant for the several different audiences. For general reports and articles, it was the Chicago Manual; largely because many of the original Scientists hailed from there. "The University Of California, Berkeley Style Guide" was universally ignored.
Of course, for newspaper articles, we had folks who could speak "AP" if necessary. There actually was a Science Reporter from the NYT who depended on us for not making him appear too foolish in print...
As for the "Internet"- "....It is a proper noun indicating the network of all globally routable addresses..." is half right, since there are chunks of the Internet that don't have "globally routable addresses", they may have private IP addresses. But they are still on "The Internet".
I actually like capitalization- there are people who loathe it for some reason. Maybe their mothers were scared by a COBOL at some point in the Maternity troff.
In the early days of Computer Indexing, one of the tricks was to capitalize words in advance that have Indexing meanings, which meant transistors, could be ignored in scanned text, while "Transistors" were a clue to the PDP-11 that something of importance was being discussed. Context was everything.
I was trying to think of an analogy to use to make the point to the idiots at AP and it occurs the me that the Internet is the most widely known specific internet in the same way the Moon is the most widely know specific moon. If you wanted to be pedantic you could refer to the Moon as the moon in orbit around the Earth (or should that be the earth now?). If you call the Internet just internet how do you specify which internet you want to refer too? What about Internet2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is that now internet2?
Apparently AP think it is the moon and some people are not happy about that, http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...
Consider 'the world.' Or 'the sky.' There's only one of each (synecdoche and other planets notwithstanding) but we don't really regard them as proper nouns. In fact, you have to go back pretty far to find a language where one of these vast media are encoded in a way that's even ambiguously a true proper noun in what is still decidedly poetic writing. I confess I initially resisted the idea of this too, but... it's not really a bad thing, in the end. The dream of the ARPANET, NSFnet, and other early nets was always to create a network medium that was invisible and omnipresent. This is just another step on that journey.
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