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Wired - Susan C. Herring 10.19.15
If you’re A writer or an
editor or a grammar nerd, or if you just happen to do a lot of reading about
technology and you’ve been around for a while, you may have noticed a trend for
the word “Internet” to be written with a lower-case “i” instead of capital “I”.
The process is called decapitalization, but “internet” is nothing new. In 2004,
Wired News’ copy chief Tony Long wrote:
“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.”
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.”
Tony Long was wrong. There were—and still are—legitimate
reasons for capitalizing the “I” in “internet. There are also compelling reasons
for decapitalizing it. These competing forces are engaged in a back-and-forth
tug of war, resulting in inconsistency in the spelling of the word. But one
form is advancing over the other, and will ultimately win out.
WIRED
OPINION
The tug-of-war has been going on for
years. Two years after Long issued his decree, Wired News was bought by Condé
Nast, and the spelling of “internet” reverted back to capital “I”. Today the
initial capital is also enshrined in the guidelines of many respected news
sources, style guides, and dictionaries, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Associated Press,
the American Psychological Association, the Chicago Manual of Style, and
Webster’s New World College Dictionary. The online scholarly journal
for which I am editor-in-chief, Language@Internet, capitalizes “Internet”,
following this standard practice.
According to Bob Wyman, a Google tech staffer and long-time
Net expert, the “I” should be capitalized to make clear the difference in meaning
between the Internet (the global network that evolved out of ARPANET, the early
Pentagon network), and any generic internet, or computer network connecting a
number of smaller networks. WIRED’s Style guide, published in 1996 and edited
by Constance Hale, makes the same distinction. Indeed, the earliest citations
for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), from the mid-1970s, refer
to “internet” in the generic sense and spell it with lowercase “i”, whereas all
the later OED examples refer to the global network, using a capital “I”.
“If you never capitalize internet,” wrote Wyman in 2008 on
his blog, “you are simply indicating that you don’t understand the technical
distinction between the Internet and an internet.”
Yet in 1999, almost 10 years earlier,
journalist Stephen Wilbers published a column in the Orange County Register predicting that words like
Internet and Web would lose their capitalization over time. “If you like being
ahead of the game, you might prefer to spell internet and web as internet and
web,” he wrote. The reason usually given for this shift in usage is that the
internet and the web are changing from proper nouns—unique, named entities—to
generic nouns through common use. Indeed, most people (other than techies) are
not aware of any internets other than the Internet—that distinction is no
longer relevant in ordinary usage. And for many younger folks who have grown up
with the technology, the internet itself is ordinary—just another communication
medium, like the telephone, television, and radio.
There are plenty of examples in the history of the English
language of decapitalization (and simplification) of common words that entered
the language as unique, named entities. Words that were capitalized come to be
written all in lower case. Multi-word expressions are joined by a hyphen and
later condensed into a single un-hyphenated word. These processes are evident
in generic terms derived from former brand names, such as frisbee (from
Frisbee) and bandaid or band-aid (from Band-Aid, originally Band Aid), as well
as in acronyms such as scuba (from SCUBA, or Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus).
Words in the technology domain get shortened and
decapitalized the more they enter common usage, as well. The words homepage,
online, email, website, and (we)blog started out as Home page, on-line, E-mail
(from Electronic Mail), Web site, and Web log. The web (or Web) itself is a
shortening of World Wide Web, which is also shortened as WWW.
The fact is, decapitalizing internet is part of a universal
linguistic tendency to reduce the amount of effort required to produce and
process commonly-used words. Not only does decapitalization save a click of the
shift key, but, as one marketing website put it, “Capital letters are speed
bumps for the eyes when reading. They should be eliminated where possible.”
Reduction of effort is a powerful driver of decapitalization. In addition, the
use of lowercase “i” as a prefix in products like the iMac, iPhone, iPad, and
iTunes—which Apple has said stands for ‘internet’—reinforces the trend.
Why, then, does initial capitalization in the word
“Internet” persist in style guides and dictionaries? Part of the reason is that
such sources are conservative by nature, lagging behind popular usage. Another
part of the reason is semantics: The capital “I” reflects the perceived status
of the global network as a unique entity. This usage is further bolstered by
autocorrect and spellcheckers, which, as of this writing, still correct
“internet” to “Internet”.
But the lower-case spelling has been gaining ground.
“Internet” was twice as frequent as “internet” between 2000 and 2012, according
to the Oxford English Corpus (a huge database that includes everything from
academic papers to internet comment sections), yet “Internet” has outpaced
“internet” by only a slim margin since 2012; by late 2015, that margin may have
disappeared. CNN and CBS News Online have adopted the lower-case spelling, as
have many overseas news sources. And many internet-native publications, those that
have never seen a print edition, use the lower case. It’s really only a matter
of time before all but the most conservative US publications adopt “internet”
as the standard spelling.
Does it really matter whether you capitalize “internet” or
not? For technology-related terms, using popular (shortened, simplified) forms
can make the writer and publication appear tech-savvy and progressive, “ahead
of the game”–but also, perhaps (in comments posted to an online forum, for
example), uneducated. Conversely, using the standard form can make a writer or
publication appear grammatically correct, but also potentially stuffy and
out-of-date. Linguistic choices have social consequences, even if the choice
involves something as apparently minor as capitalization.
Some commentators have gone so far as to suggest that
(de)capitalization is a political choice. Capitalizing the word Internet
connotes that the technology is important, something few people would dispute.
But rote capitalization also treats the complex, dynamic internet like a static
object, contributing “to the types of simplistic dialogues about our
technological future that are most problematic,” according to one critical
source.
From a linguist’s perspective, all of this is fascinating.
But editors crave consistency, and style rules exist to reduce distractions so
that readers’ attention will be directed to content instead of format. At
present, which spelling of internet is considered correct depends mostly on
whether the context (or editorial policy) calls for formal, prescriptive usage
or informal language use. The lower-case version will eventually win the day,
though, driven by age-old principles of language change. In this respect,
Stephen Wilbers and Tony Long were ahead of the game.
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scoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
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