AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web anymore

[bill]

AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web anymore [poynter.org]

Associated Press editors announced a new stylebook change Saturday ahead of a session at the annual American Copy Editors Society's conference — the 2016 stylebook will lowercase the words "internet" and "web."

"The changes reflect a growing trend toward lowercasing both words, which have become generic terms," AP Standards Editor Thomas Kent told Poynter via email.

[lucy24]

Not long ago I blundered across an article on {major dictionary site} about the use of the word "deprecated" to mean ... well, what you and I use it to mean. In 2016. Hot off the presses. I thought: Jiminy Christmas, yes, that's one standard usage of the word, and has been for a good many years. Live with it.

[tangor]

gee whiz. who'd a thunk? or might this be because too many are lazy and can't find the shift key?

[not2easy]

Mobile: caps=2 efforts.

[lucy24]

I really, really do not want to consider the possibility that a major wire service is publishing articles that came directly from a mobile device without further editing.

[LifeinAsia]

as one marketing website put it, “Capital letters are speed bumps for the eyes when reading. They should be eliminated where possible.”

yes, let's completely eliminate capital letters so we can speed up the internet. with net neutrality, it's probably illegal to use capitals.

of course punctuation causes more speed bumps for the eyes when reading so lets get rid of all punctuation that way all the internet can look like the term papers of so socalled high school graduates

and since emoji came from punctuation marks we have to get rid of all of those as well

and if you really think about it spaces between words slow things down too soletsgetridofallthesapecsinaddiontocapitalizationsandpuctuation

[Andy Langton]

@LifeinAsia - that reminds of the "Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling", frequently attributed to Mark Twain:

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet.

The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later.

Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.

Bai iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

[vordmeister]

I'm not sure if I have ever written either 'internet' or 'web' with a leading capital. It's a proper noun or name thing. 'Webmasterworld' deserves capitalisation, but the 'rest of the web' doesn't.

You wouldn't write 'the rest of the Web' any more than you would write 'the rest of the Tree'. Is the use of English more strongly protected in the USA? If so how did you mange to mess it up so much? :)

[LifeinAsia]

If so how did you mange to mess it up so much?

Years of practice!

[lucy24]

Is the use of English more strongly protected in the USA?

No more than in the rest of the English-speaking world, which means: far less that any European language you can name, since in place of an Academy we've got several centuries of pseudo-rules made up by people who didn't know the first thing about even their own language, let alone human languages in general.

:: insert quotation from dear Frederick Furnivall or someone like him ::

The present thread isn't about national policy, though. It's about one, isolated private organization's internal style manual.

Now, personally I use Title Case for "web" if it's a complete phrase, like "World Wide Web". But "the Web", capitalized, sounds like the plot of a futuristic movie.

But "internet" is trickier. For example, almost everyone would say ISP (and IP) rather than isp (and ip). But if I wrote it out I'd be inclined to lower-case the whole thing, because Internet Service Provider, like that, sounds like a governmental agency. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense if I try to analyze it, so I need to rack my brains for an analogy.

[piatkow]

I would always use lower case for "web" and "internet" unless they formed part of a title. Initialisations should always be upper case of course even when lower case is used when they are written out in full. Acronyms are a grey area as they can gradually be accepted as words in their own right. It would never occur to me to capitalise "radar" but would always capitalise "NATO"