I take a little issue with the article's quoted claim that "capital letters are speed bumps for the eyes when reading. They should be eliminated where possible." Says who? Capital letters appear all over, for a variety of reasons, and it doesn't cause any issues. Not to mention languages like German which capitalize way more than English.
> Not to mention languages like German which capitalize way more than English.
And as everyone knows, Germans drive like crazy on their Autobahns, so they're clearly not the type of people who would willingly put speed bumps into their sentences. Therefore, capital letters don't work like speed bumps at all. My logic is bulletproof, case closed!
This myth may have been true 30 years ago, but if you go on any Autobahn today, you will find there's at most 5km, if at all, of unrestricted sections. Germany is famous for its forest of street signs and speed restrictions on roads are very popular with the administration. There's often config like UNRESTRICTED -> 100km/h -> 80km/h -> 60km/h -> 100km/h. Or the worst: 70km/h -> 100km/h for maybe 150 meters -> 70km/h again. Arguably the 100km/h section could be replaced with no signs aka still 70km/h. But, street signs are popular in Germany and sometimes I have the impression somebody gains by the number of signs posted. Yeah, so no unrestricted autobahns, really.
I've found it more relaxed to drive at a constant 120km/h in the Netherlands. No braking and accelerating all the time.
Not sure about this. I drove through Europe last year, including through several cities in Germany and encountered a lot of unrestricted autobahns. There are some areas where they gradually decrease the speed limit (often for roadworks) but I never came across any section for which the the speed limit was altered for, effectively, less than 8 seconds. As someone living in the UK, the missing presence of 40/50mph average speed regions for tens of miles was quite welcome.
There really aren't long stretches of unlimited road and frequent limit fluctuation is risky both from an accident and ticketing perspective. If you want to slow it down, keep it at 80km/h, but don't do a circus of jumping up/down.
Yes, hidden cameras aren't used, but there are lots of speed cameras[1].
Second, although anecdotal: I don't drive that much in Japan (live in a part of Tokyo where cars are just a hindrance), but I make the 2+ hour drive to Shizuoka every few months. Every trip, I definitely see several people being pulled over for speeding.
Most people do seem to drive 30kph or more over the limit, though.
They don't, and most japanese roads (including highways) have ridiculously low speed limits[0], but as rangibaby notes the speed limits are uncommonly enforced, nobody respects them
[0] default 60km/h[1] for undivided inter-urban roads though it's common to get a 50 or even 40km/h speed limits, the default highway speed limit is 100km/h[2] but it's commonly lower than that, and I've seen limits as low as 70km/h on highways, keep in mind that all highways are toll roads and they're expensive as hell (entry fee of ~¥200 plus ~¥25/km[3], Hokkaido has a special tourists rental ETC[4], Honshu does not)
[1] under 40mph
[2] 62mph
[3] ~¥40/mi
[4] from ¥1800/day for 2 days to ¥800/day for 2 weeks or more, unlimited travel. With regular ETC, going from Sapporo to its airport (New Chitose) is ¥1400.
But I've heard very good things about Japan's bullet trains, so I'd guess there's lees need for highways.
In Europe only France seems to have high speed train that actually goes at high speeds. German ICE is chugging along in first gear all the time except for short stretches but those are are very few and between.
I once took Cologne to Amsterdam with ICE and it took more than 3 hours, which defeats the point of a fast train.
JR built Shinkansen-only tracks that have their own stations and no level crossings, which means they are essentially going their full speed the entire journey.
Driving is still popular here.
A) It's fun, there is a lot of beautiful scenery to admire and highway service areas have restaurants where you can eat some local food or buy souvenirs from that area.
B) It's cheaper to go by car once you have four people, even with highway fees and gas (most journeys in Japan aren't that long in terms of actual distance traveled, and normal cars are legally mandated to have very good fuel efficiency).
TBH my favorite way to travel is by highway bus. They used to really suck, but have gotten better in the last five years or so because they have a lot of competition from high-speed rail and cheap airfares. You can travel comfortably in a big seat with free wifi and power outlets very cheaply, usually less than half of the equivalent Shinkansen ticket, in exchange for the journey taking a few hours more.
I mean similar as a confusing amount of different speed limits on roads. You are way more likely to be stopped for speeding on normal (gratis) roads than highways.
When speed reading that is one technique to pick out sentence subject. They're not saying capitalization is an "issue", they're merely saying it causes more cognitive load so should be reserved for things that really do give the reader more information.
The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, usually called the AP Stylebook, is an English grammar style and usage guide created by American journalists working for or connected with the Associated Press over the last century to standardize mass communications. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Stylebook
I don't see a high degree of relevance of German grammar to a critique of the AP document [though I see it as more relevant than the rules of logosyllabbic languages such as Chinese]. Readers of German have different expectations than readers of American english and a standards document probably ought to take those differences into account because the goal of journalistic writing is to communicate to a particular audience.
The article says "as one marketing website put it", which suggests to me it's nothing but a justification of the recent design trend of making things flat, bland, and "featureless", for lack of a better word.
Capital letters make it easy to find proper nouns and sentences when scanning quickly. Their omission is why I find "IM speak" harder to read.
Ironically, while reading very quickly your comment, I clearly stopped on Germain because it was different than the rest of the words (capitalized) ;-)
When you speed read you pick up phrases and even whole sentences at once.
In a language that doesn't use capital letters so much, they stand out and whilst speed reading you do need to slow down a bit and figure out what's weird with the sentence being read. You can no longer just directly pick it up, you have to read it one notch slower and build it. This can be quite noticeable when speed reading. It happens with large words too. As you get used to certain capitalized words (names in a book, common large words, things like Internet) this speed bump decreases, but it's still there for people.
Why the hell not? It's a proper noun, and we capitalize them. The proper noun "Internet" refers to a specific instance of an "internet", a common noun.
But in real-world usage the word "internet" always refers to the internet. You would never refer to "an internet"—more likely terminology would be "intranet," "LAN" or "corporate network," or, in a historical context, something along the lines of "internet precursor."
Going further, "internet" is wrong. There have been, and still are in some cases multiple internets. The Internet may dwarf the others in size, but the distinction is still an important technical point (AP rules be damned).
Technical correctness is moot when the majority already (mis)understands a word's meaning. Regardless, "internet" is just a laughably generic abbreviation of "interconnected (computer) network". On the technical front, I would think WAN/MAN/LAN would be the more proper technical terminology, right?
This whole conversation reminds me of the unwinnable fight to get popular media/culture to use "cracker", rather than the over-used and technically incorrect "hacker", when malicious black-hattery is afoot.
Technical correctness and precision language is what enables those of us who build the future to progress forward. Incorrect language and imprecise thinking holds back those who do not clear their minds, preventing them from contributing themselves to the global project of progress. These things do matter.
Sensible defaults are not a harm to technical correctness or precision. It's not like anyone would be able to refer to any of the other internets without at least a qualifying adjective, and it would likely require much more context than that.
1 - I'm torn on how to handle the evolution of language. On the one hand, language evolves and mutates. To complain that people use "literally" wrong is to shout at the tide. On the other hand, words have specific meanings, and if we discard those for different meanings, what takes up the slack? If "literally" now means "emphasized figuratively", what then would I say to use the old meaning? If "meme" now means captioned pic, how do I refer to a concept transferred between people? I really don't mind language evolving, but the loss of precision bothers me.
2 - Re: the "unwinnable" fight to promote "cracker" over "hacker". I'd argue that this fight had some success! Not that anyone says "cracker", but that the definition of "hacker" moved from "treacherous programmer" to "skilled computer programmer, which allows for the possibility of threat". No idea what the dictionary says, but when I hear "hacker" used in the media these days, it _feels_ different than it did in the late-90s, early-aughts. Perhaps that change would've happened without the attempt to emphasis a difference, but I'm inclined to believe the effort had some payoff.
I fear that today, most people's understanding of the Internet is the Web or, worse, Facebook. This isn't necessarily a misconception we want to promote either.
Which "things" constitute proper nouns is at least a bit ambiguous. In general, there's a tendency to capitalize new terms that haven't entered the broad lexicon. So, at various times, it's been common to see the Web, Big Data, Open Source, and so forth. The problem with doing things this way is that you either 1.) End up dropping the caps semi-arbitrarily at some point or 2.) you end up with sentences like "I commonly use Open Source Software on the Web to do my Big Data analyses."
My usage of the internet really isn't that much different from my usage of the automobile. I don't know why you think it's a proper noun. It's just the name of the thing.
I have to agree with others here that the particular reasons given in the article for why AP will no longer be capitalizing "Internet" don't really make sense. I'm pretty sure I always capitalize it, except perhaps in IM/chat when I capitalize very little.
I don't know if I've ever capitalized "web". Certainly I remember how the NYT's insistence on spelling "weblogs" "Web logs" drove me nuts for years (this was way back in 1999 and the early 2000s before "blog", kids). The reasoning and usage of the people who coined and actually use a new word surely should have some influence on how it is spelled when the word is reported on.
Which brings me back to "Internet"--same argument from me: the style should follow that of the people to whom the word is most relevant, unless they are just ludicrously out of step with common usage.
So I'm curious if they actually did research on how people spell "Internet" in non-casual settings, or if they are just trying to set a precedent and truly believe that capital letters are "speed bumps" (that's true in a sense: our brain pauses on them precisely because we've trained ourselves to understand that they are used for Important Things like names).
Wow, reading the comments is fascinating. It is amazing how strong people's opinions can be on something that is ultimately inconsequential. Well, here's my two cents:
I've never thought internet should be capitalized. I was always under the impression that was the majority view of tech people though from reading the comments here, I may be mistaken. It seems even that what is or is not a proper noun is not self evident. I do not consider internet or moon or sun (other common examples in these comments) to be proper nouns. Those are not their names. Just because we generally consider them singular and unique does not make them proper nouns anymore than "the car" is when I talk to my wife. We only have one car. It is singular and unique, but "Car" is not it's name.
However, follow whatever rule you want. Most people are terrible at following the rules anyway, even when they know them. We just have to accept a certain amount of variability in these things. Just know that it will always look strange to me to see internet, sun, or moon capitalized.
I understand that is the opinion of many people. It is not, however, my opinion. In my opinion, those are descriptive and are not in fact names. If I were forced to name them, I might call them Luna and Sol.
Just to clarify on your moon example, the typical logic behind its capitalisation is that - e.g. - Jupiter has many moons (each with their own name), Earth has one moon; Earth's moon is called the Moon.
There is only one internet [sic.]
That said, the difference is absolutely inconsequential. English prepositions offer sufficient context to make this whole debate redundant in most cases anyway.
I think it's too late for that kind of prescriptivism. "Internet" is not a technical term anymore; it's within the top 1,500 words of the English language according to [1], and its meaning is subject to evolution like any other word. Almost everyone knows it, and almost no one would use it to refer to private networks linked between multiple physical sites (say, SIPRnet, or a CDN's network, as considered separately from the larger network it's embedded into) - including experienced engineers, unless they were being pedantic. At some point the original definition is no more meaningful than an insistence that "data" should be plural, or to never split an infinitive.
> Sun should be capitalized when referring to the star at the center of our solar system, as opposed to other suns -- the stars at the center of other planetary systems.
"Telephone" and "radio" are not proper nouns in your examples, unlike "the Internet," which refers to a specific internetwork. When using "internet" as a common noun to refer to any other internetwork, you should not capitalize according to the rules of English grammar.
This style guide proposes an exception to grammar rules to fit common usage.
I consider it a proper noun because it fits the definition of a proper noun. In your sentence, "the world" is also a proper noun, but you didn't capitalize it for reasons of style, like the sun or the moon. To quote the AP style guide, "AP capitalizes the proper names of planets, including Earth, stars, constellations, etc., but lowercases sun and moon."
The Internet is unlike radio and telephone. Radios and telephones are devices, you usually refer to the one you have nearby. The Internet is a specific global network - this word refers to the same single entity, unlike "telephone" and "radio".
I was 100% for the capitalization of internet until I read your comment.
I think you just wrecked the analogy without realizing it. Your telephone is connected to a telephone network, which is an interconnected network of telephonic devices. Your device is one of many, and has no distinction from others except that it has a unique address in physical space and additionally has an address on the telephone network. Your radio picks up radio signals, a form of wireless mesh network throughout the world (add in signal repeaters used for trunking systems, etc), and you access it with your radio.
In either case of common usage of devices we use to communicate, we don't capitalize the networks, nor do we capitalize the devices (usually, though walkie-talkie I've seen capitalized sometimes).
You use a computer (maybe even the computer - still lowercase - if you have only one in your home) to access the interconnected network of computers to which it is designed to connect via some network adapter and routing device, possibly with a signal modulator/demodulator in there somewhere).
That interconnected network of computers is no different from the interconnected network of radio signals used by trunking systems all over the world, or the interconnected network of telephone signals a POTS line brings to your home.
I think it depends on the network - some have names (like the Internet, ARPANet, DoD's NIPRNet, etc) and some don't (like the global POTS network). Saying "we talked on the phone" is more like saying "we talked on the computer" than "we talked on the Internet."
That's what I was taught as well, but it seems that that's precisely the usage that the new style guidelines are changing. I don't personally think there's anything wrong either way, although my personal sense of style leans me towards the traditional capitalization.
When in doubt, I usually check Wikipedia's style guide [0] rather than anything else. Some of it is Wikipedia-specific (e.g., markup syntax), but there is also good general-purpose advice. It also has the major advantage of being free.
I agree, Wikipedia's style guide is great! I think it strikes a good balance between prescription and flexibility, eg. being able to use local date formats and spellings in articles that relate to that locality.
I don't agree with this. The Internet is clearly a proper noun like America, Jesus or Associated Press. It is somewhere between a place and an idea which might confuse the AP people but it is THE big thing between a place and idea of our time and it deserves proper noun status.
I take less issue with web being written lowercase. It is a shortening of World Wide Web anyway.
It's interesting to see both terms genericized. It was Alan Kay who said:
> The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. . . . The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
Alan Kay has so many amazing quotes. One of my favorite funny ones is from an OOPSLA lecture where he says "arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras".
Do proper names in English use article, really? I had the exact opposite idea (as in my own language). Actually I believed that "the" Internet was a weird exception, not the rule.
Is there a specific rule? I ask because I haven't seen "The Michael" or "The Germany". I did see "The Netherlands", but that seems like an exception.
There isn't a systematic rule as far as I know. Some proper names get a definite article, some don't. Sometimes "the" is part of the name and capitalized, and sometimes it's not:
Germany, Washington, New York, Jesus, Dolph Lundgren, Apollo, Godzilla, JavaScript, Madonna, Microsoft.
Uncapitalized: the Netherlands, the South, the President of the US, the Everglades, the Pleiades, the Rolling Stones.
One that I find interesting is that we Brits say "the BBC" but don't extend that courtesy to other broadcasters, either foreign (ABC, NBC) or British (ITV). I guess that reflects how it's seen as a little more than just a corporation, if still a little less than a government agency.
It seems strange that "the President" is a proper name.
In Spanish we used to say e.g. "el papa" (pope) when not mentioned near the proper name "el Papa Francisco".
Nowadays even if they're still common names, a lot of public positions and institutions are capitalized by media, probably to show that they're more important than us, common mortals :-)
I remember being annoyed writing documents for the job that insisted in taking this fad to an extreme and capitalizing everything that was even vaguely related to the authority positions.
There's a special level at hell for language reformers.
Yeah- that was actually how he was known in the press when he first became (in)famous as a rich guy with a lot of busted projects but who nevertheless talked with a lot of bravado.
I wonder where the AP weighs in regarding the use of Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi is a registered trademark [1], with a standard implementation, but I could easily see the sentence, "My phone is using wifi to access the internet." being acceptable.
I can't help but think there's a political motive in here somewhere? Stripping the Internet of its proper noun status could serve to help thwart attempts at declaring ownership over it, and help arguments to have it declared more globally as a common carrier.
Not an April Fools' joke. Colour me surprised, as some of the quoted previous AP changes are hilarious: 'more than' can replace 'over'... "More than my dead body!"
Historically speaking, there were many Internets, and even today there are many Internets, it's a myth that there is an Internet, the Internet, etc.
For example, users in China have an Internet that is different than an Internet in another country.
Personally, if their was to be a style change, it in my opinion would be to stop saying "the Internet" since it is vague a leads to the public believing it exists.
I am looking forward to the day that AP starts replacing the missing penultimate "e"'s in the poorly spelled names of companies that were too cheap to buy the correct domain name, like Flickr and Flattr.
was there a push for the AP to not even use "internet (lowercase)" anymore, but go further, what the masses would call it - "Facebook"? (jury's out on whether that needs a capital haha)
They are proper nouns. There is basically one Internet (in common speech) and one WWW. Other internets are not the Internet. (My spell checker doesn't recognize "internets".)
What's next: "you are" will formally become "u r" bc ppl r 2 lazy 2 type?
Languages evolve, but I don't think that misuses should be formalized as correct. It's already hard enough for speakers of some languages to understand English's capitalization system. I think that adding more exceptions makes learning the language more difficult to learn.
People frequently spell "I" with a lowercase letter, so why formally approve lowercase for "internet" but not for "i"?
As an old-timer: that was the exception, not the rule. It was just as much "the Internet" in 1993 as it is now. It just wasn't as widely known by the mass public, so different usages were less likely to be caught by editors/etc.
The usage appeared even in books on the topic. In my personal library I have a 1993 book, "The Electronic Traveller: Exploring Alternative Online Systems".
I don't recall internet without the "the" being used by anybody in the UK in the early 90s. One confounding factor is that news articles were almost 100% written by people who had no knowledge or experience of the topic, and were almost universally as buttock-clenchingly awful as any article written on youth culture at any point in history. In the US in particular the press seems to glory in using the wrong phrases and sounding utterly disconnected from whatever they are reporting on
