12.28.07
[i/I]nternet
Asking out of curiousity, do you purposely not capitalize “Internet”?
Yeah, that’s by design.
In my academic writing about the Internet, I did capitalize it, because that’s the “correct” thing to do. (Aside: as a psych major, I did some stuff on social development of introverts on the Internet. PDF, 1.9mb, my stuff starts on page 28.)
But I think it looks dumb for a blog. To me, it has a connotation of out-of-touch-ness, as if the Internet is a strange land we must refer to formally, instead of our native environment.
This is what I think of:
Uppercase Internet: “The Internet is a series of tubes.” Or maybe Fox 11’s news report on Anonymous.
Lowercase internet: “What part of the internet are you from?”
Am I wrong? Tell me about it in the comments.
AMP said,
December 28, 2007 at 6:58 pm
I’m just confuzzled you didn’t call it “Let me show you my internet”.
rachel said,
December 28, 2007 at 7:01 pm
That’s bad grammar! How about:
my internet
let me show you it
Frank said,
January 6, 2008 at 7:05 pm
An interesting link on this discussion here, I always trust her because she does good research:
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/Capitalizing-Proper-Nouns.aspx
rachel said,
January 6, 2008 at 7:46 pm
Excellent! I’d heard of Grammar Girl but I haven’t been reading her consistently. I agree with her take on this - my contention would be that the internet is not, in fact, one place, but actually an interdependent but decentralized collection of computers, and therefore a common noun.
Alessandro said,
January 7, 2008 at 1:01 am
That’s also bad grammar: “my internets, let me show you them” is better.
The internet should only be capitalized if you’re Fox News. Back to paper now.
vvave said,
January 21, 2008 at 11:31 pm
I never knew grammar can be so important. Maybe i/Internet form should be based on formal and informality? Anyways, I think you’re not wrong.