Wired drops the initial cap on Internet?

So that's "internet" and "web" and "net." Wha...? Will any other reputable publications follow suit? Is it just a slow news day over there and they're looking for hits? The dumbest thing about the decision is the explanation:

Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.

True believers are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies or, in this case, techies. If It's Capitalized, It Must Be Important. In German, where all nouns are capitalized, it makes sense. It makes no sense in English. So until we become Die Wired Nachrichten, we'll just follow customary English-language usage. (Web will continue to be capitalized when part of the more official entity, World Wide Web.)

...

But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and receiving information. That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.

That's about the lamest, most aggravating explanation I've ever heard--and they undercut it with the comment on the Web. As a professional writer who started as a professional editor (and before that, even a professional proofreader), I hate self-important capitalization. But it's got nuthin' to do with why Internet, Web, and Net are capped. They're capped because they're proper nouns, dumbasses: Like Wired Magazine. And Mr. Dumbass. The Internet is a particular, unique entity. That's why it has a "the" in front of it. So is the Web. The Net is clearly an abbreviation of the Internet. "Television," "radio," and "movable type" are not proper nouns--and that explanation is ignorant or disingenuous or I don't know what. It's just aggravating because it only contributes to the perception that grammar is arbitrary, style (which *is* arbitrary) has no meaning or sense behind it, and wheeee, why don't we just spell anything and throw together words however we want? Wheee!

Should be good for business, though.

(And I just read: MIT Press apparently already tried this. To no avail. If the auto-correct on MS Word can be considered the near-final arbiter of availment.)

Comments

[claude handleface]

ol' beverly marshall saling was WAAAY ahead of the game -- she had us ditching the hyphen in "e-mail" and lowercasing internet years and years and years ago.