Capitalization and the Internet
I recently found myself writing a proposal. Someone kindly informed me that the word “Internet” should be capitalized. I doubt very seriously, left on my own, the thought of capitalizing the word “Internet” would have even occurred to me. I had to sit down and look up the “official” rules. Here’s roughly what I discovered:
- The Internet is capitalized when referring to the interconnected worldwide network of computers.
- An internet would be not capitalized when referring to any old interconnected network of computers (although this is almost universally called an intranet).
- When used as an adjective, it depends. For example, there are many internet protocols.
The 1980s
Despite the correctness, reading text where people discuss the Internet with a capital “I” looks old-fashioned to me. It would be like someone referring to their e-mails from the Web site. There’s no doubt in my mind that the transformation from Internet to internet is inevitable (just like email and website). In both informal and semi-formal online writing, we are already there.
This old-fashioned nature is especially apparent (bordering on wrong) when you mix capitalization. It just looks wrong to proclaim that you need an internet connection to get on the Internet. How do you capitalize the sentence, “We’ve lost internet”.
Why
Can anyone explain to me why the Internet should be capitalized but not the Highway System? Or the Frequency Spectrum? Or the Sky? Maybe it’s because we distilled the rather longer “interconnected computer network” into internet and that qualifies it as a proper name (except for the obvious fact that sometimes you can have just an internet).
Apparently, all the little internets are unworthy but the big one gets its proper name. Are there any other words that behave in this way? (edited to add: the Moon is arguably another example).
This separate naming convention supposedly reduces confusion. Yet, it did such a poor job that we invented and now use the word intranet instead of “internet” when referring to some networks of computers. No one uses the word “internet” to refer to anything but the Internet.
Apparently, there’s a consensus
As of now, most “experts” agree that when referring to the Internet, you need a capital “I”. I wish I had a vote. As it turns out, almost all informal and semi-formal online writing has abandoned these ancient rules. It appears, equally, that all style “experts” believe that formal English will lose the capitalization requirements eventually.
It strikes me odd that we need to wait. I figured that languages should be a bit more organic. I presumed that if “everyone” either knows or believes it will be a certain way in the future, we should go ahead and skip the waiting step. It’s not like there is some guy in England deciding what is and isn’t right — that’s why we fought the war.
April 13th, 2009 at 9:28 am
“An internet”, in the eighties sense, is not really the same thing we mean by “intranet” today. If we had to recoin the term from scratch, I expect it would come out “metanet”, from “meta-network”, i.e. network of networks–”an internet”, properly speaking, referred to any network connecting two pre-existing networks; ARPANET was the one that evolved into Internet, and when all the competition (BITNET, various X.25 networks, pre-NNTP Usenet, etc.) died off or became assimilated, “Internet” became “the internet”.
BTW, I did some cursory personal research into the history of the terminology, looking mostly at the use of “the” with “internet”, and found some military networking specs from the late sixties or early seventies which used the phrase “the internet” in the other possible sense. E.g., “once network A and B are connected, the internet behaves as follows”. It was a bit odd to see used that way, though of course perfectly reasonable given the meaning it had then.
Also BTW, the Sun surely counts, even if it’s not quite as common to refer to other stars as “other suns” (yet?) as it is to talk about other moons.
You might like http://www.languagelog.com/
April 13th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
To continue the astronomy theme, you can scoop up a shovelful of earth and then go up in a shuttle and orbit the Earth.
April 15th, 2009 at 1:45 am
Blessed be our languages that demand capitalization of nouns anyway
But thanks for the hint, this thought never even occured to me.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:42 pm
The Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of Tubes. And if you don’t understand, those Tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that Tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
April 15th, 2009 at 11:46 pm
Your little tagline (on programming and the internets, every monday)
needs a capital ‘I’. Also an ‘M’ while you’re at it.