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An interesting post, greatly harmed by this little note: (Linguistically, this same devolution has happened with the Web itself. Although it's TidBITS house st
by Locke1689 17y ago
An interesting post, greatly harmed by this little note:
(Linguistically, this same devolution has happened with the Web itself. Although it's TidBITS house style to capitalize "Web" - a proper noun that's a shortening of "World Wide Web" - it's commonplace to see even professionally edited publications lowercase the word, thus de-emphasizing the fact that it's a unique thing. I think they're wrong: "Web" should always be capitalized, as should "Internet.")
Linguistically, no one cares. This is so unimportant a point that it just points out how pedantic the author is. Just because someone doesn't know the origin of a word doesn't mean that they can't use that word correctly and to good use. That's like complaining that people spell the word "medieval" instead of "mediaeval" and trying to argue that it must then be impossible to understand the Battle of Hastings.
- salvadors 17y agosigh. It's "mediæval", people. How can you expect anyone to agree with your analogy if you can't even get that right?!
- Locke1689 17y agoI know what an ash grapheme is, but I'm also lazy when it comes to Unicode. Thanks for looking that up for me but I can no longer edit my post.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoYep. Complaining about the natural evolution of language is a sign that you're being a crank. But at least language cranks are good for a laugh, because in the throes of rationalization they invariably make up these hilariously broken rules. Today's rule seems to be that "unique things should be capitalized in English usage", which is certainly how the World should be. Why, my Mother would cringe if she saw such terrible usage. Or maybe I'm misstating the rule: It's "if your word was once part of a proper noun, its proper-nounishness should be preserved henceforth". Which means that whenever I accidentally drop my Sandwich, or a Hamburger, or even a Frankfurter on a pile of Xeroxes I should use a Kleenex to clean up the mess. And you have to really watch out for those backformations, lest you write Crap when you really mean to write crap. (Though it looks like "crapper" -- or should I say Crapper? -- might in fact be derived from a proper noun, if the following link is 100% correct... which, frankly, is not too likely.) http://www.theplumber.com/crapper.html http://www.theplumber.com/crapper.html
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoComplaining about the natural evolution of language is a sign that you're being a crank. +1 (coming from a reformed ex-crank).
- Gormo 17y agoIronically, it's also completely wrong. "Internet" is a common noun, hence the article "the". You can find another network which can be considered an internet (such as Internet2, which has a proper name). Same with "web". We say "the web". Which one? The world-wide one. No one says "I am using Web", except characters in SNL sketches.