Down with capital letters
You cannot fathom the tizzy this article has created in my office today.
It's Just the 'internet' Now
By Tony Long
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,64596,00.html
08:14 AM Aug. 16, 2004 PT
Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the "I" in internet.
At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net.
Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.
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. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we'll just follow customary English-language usage. (Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)
Still, the decision wasn't made lightly. Style changes are rarely capricious, since change plays havoc with the editor's sacred cow, consistency.
But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.
This should not be interpreted as some kind of symbolic demotion. Think of it more as a stylistic reality check.
Naturally, as part of a company name or organization -- the Internet Movie Database, for example -- the "I" remains capitalized. It also remains capped in headlines, where Wired News style decrees that all principal words are capitalized.
But now, by lowercasing internet, web and net, Wired News is simply giving the medium its proper due.
Tony Long is Wired News' copy chief. His previous atrocity against the cult of technology was inserting a hyphen in "e-mail."
It stemmed into a couple of arguments. Like do we wait for CP to catch up with what we've all been waiting for and we descended back into the at what point do we remove the hyphen as a word evolves.
The world of PR gets more exciting every day.
HRH
posted by Her Highnessness at 13:23
7 Comments:
We occasionally get calls at work from people expecting us to settle arguments over stuff like that. =) It wasn't that long ago that we went from "Web site" to "website" (two changes in one step - gasp!) and it sparked the whole Internet/internet debate all over again.
I say you shouldn't have to wait for CP, you should make your own style guide.
-Alasdair
1:49 PM
We do have a style guide of our own, but we try to stick to CP. Mostly so that when people come into our office wailing about how this or that isn’t or is capitalized (and they do) we can show them that it’s CP style. Occasionally we throw caps and spelling at them or even beat them with it. I’d hate to deprive my fellow editors of that joy.
2:38 PM
Boo-urns, says I. I hate unnecessary capitalization, yet I will continue to capitalize Internet for as long as I am physically able. I don't know enough about the origins of TV or radio to know whether they were once proper names, but the Internet is just that -- it's *the* Internet, not *an* internet like you'd have a TV or radio. And if they're sticking with uppercase World Wide Web (which I say is synonymous with Internet, anyway), why on earth would they go with lowercase web site?
I'll respect any publication's decision to change its style (even if I do so kicking and screaming), but when that guy says there's no reason to capitalize the "I" in Internet, it just makes him sound ignorant.
3:18 PM
Guess I shoulda signed that last comment, eh?
This at least gives me a chance to add that Net should not only be capitalized, but should be spelled 'Net, with the apostrophe.
-Matej, resident pedant
3:20 PM
And now a history lesson from our sponsoring nerd ...
The word "internet" was created to mean any network that bridges two otherwise seperate networks. If you have a home network, and you connect that to your ISP's network, then that qualifies as a "network of networks", or an "internet".
The Internet is a proper name, created to refer to the internet that spans the globe - originally formed by connecting DARPANet with several schools and research institutions. At the time, another popular internet was the newly formed MilNet, which was the proper name for the internet of military networks.
The noun "intranet" was later coined to refer to an internet which was purposefully isolated within an organizational boundry, usually for the purposes of confidentiality and security.
I agree with Wired's new policy on not capitalizing "web" (the capital there was a holdover from the acronym W.W.W. for "World Wide Web"), but not placing the capital on Internet makes as much sense as them changing their style guide so that the magazine's name is "wired".
As a sidenote: it's hard to take Tony Long seriously on his rant about "true believers" of capitalization when he goes on to turn the nouns "lower case" into the verb "lowercasing". Ugh.
9:56 AM
"World Wide Web (which I say is synonymous with Internet, anyway"
Boo-urns, I say!
I know you know there is more to the Internet than just WWW. But even regular folks know that e-mail is part of the Internet too. I'll leave you to fight for 'Net whilst I battle to the death over that (non-) synonymity.
-Alasdair
2:03 PM
Alasdair, you're right, of course. I knew when I read it back that someone was going to point that out. I didn't actually mean synonymous -- more like equivalent in terms of function, or something. I wasn't saying that they mean the same thing, but that if one is capitalized, the other should also be -- they're both proper names.
Plus, you'd probably be surprised at how little I know about the whole interweb thing when it comes to the finer points.
5:07 PM
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