AP Style alert: Don’t capitalize internet and web any more
poynter.org
poynter.org
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!
I've found it more relaxed to drive at a constant 120km/h in the Netherlands. No braking and accelerating all the time.
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.
[1]: http://www.accessj.com/2013/05/automated-speed-cameras-in-ja...
[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.
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.
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.
Not actually true. They may drive fast but in a really cultural and organized way while (mostly) respecting all the rules.
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.
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.
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.
Kristen Hare is unlikely to win this year's prize.
http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/moon-vs-moon-a-study...
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.
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.
Seek ye not consistency in the rules of the English language; that way lies madness.
Whereas in the speculative future, people are unlikely to say they live on the Mars (etc).
Ming the Merciless sidestepped the issue by labeling his buttons in capital letters. [1]
[1] http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z9E0myUALKw/UIRPUfNFiBI/AAAAAAAABE...
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).
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.
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.
However, one can create other internets, and those are not capitalized.
> Atmosphere should be capitalized when referring to the single, proper Atmosphere that most of us breathe.
> However, there are other atmospheres (e.g., on other planets), and those are not capitalized.
> 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.
> As we came to understand that the stars in the sky are other suns [...]
- http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/exoplanet-e...
See also the 2nd definition at http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sun :
> : any star that has planets which move around it
None of them, according to the AP.
"Your voice sounds familiar. Have we spoken on the Telephone before?"
"No, but I used to be on the Radio."
This style guide proposes an exception to grammar rules to fit common usage.
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.
Relatedly, a few places where I've worked used "The Intranet" to refer to its internal network.
I take less issue with web being written lowercase. It is a shortening of World Wide Web anyway.
> 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.
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
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.
Capitalized: The Hague, The Rock.
English is weird.
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.
I believe you say "the president" (lowercase), but "the President of the United States". It's only capitalized when part of the full title, I think.
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.
Signed,
The Internet
Best story ever.
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.
Edit: they did make the right call with email though so there might be hope.
What's next: "you are" will formally become "u r" bc ppl r 2 lazy 2 type?
People frequently spell "I" with a lowercase letter, so why formally approve lowercase for "internet" but not for "i"?
Example usage from 1993, https://youtu.be/KDxqfgIDvEY
Also antiquated terms like "cyberspace" never adopted an article. "He's on cyberspace" not "the cyberspace".
You can see the lack of articles being used here: http://imgur.com/a4qbEuJ
Both styles were widespread. Briefly...
I provided 6 separate instances spanning 2 countries...
This is not false information. There's 5 videos and a photo from a book.
I have two more books with this usage if people want and I can dig up articles from newspapers too if needed.
In fact, there was a drive in late 93, early 94 to actively discourage this variation from being used. I can also dig that up.