April 19, 2005

• oops, I forgot to give credit to The Morning News.
• I hate it when some bloke with a fancy title tells us something we've known for ages and grabs the world's attention.
• Also.
• Um... from the professor's "common mistakes made by students" page: 7. Not capitalizing the word- Internet. It is not "internet". If this is indeed correct usage, then we need to start capitalizing Television and Radio as well. It's a medium for communication, not a physical place or thing. If you insist that it is indeed a physical place or thing because it consists of routers and machines and whatnot, I submit to you that Television studios and Radio broadcasting studios are also full of equipment and machines and whatnot. If you then insist that the medium itself is transported differently, that Internet uses physical connections while Television and Radio do not, I submit to you WiFi. Finally I remind you that all matter is energy, and of course conversely all energy is matter, therefore if Internet is a proper noun because it consists of a physical thing, we must now give Television and Radio their due, because in whatever form they take they also are consisting of a physical thing, be it waves of EnergyMatter in the ether or the plastic, glass and silicon box in your living room. I mean for fuck's sake, Wired Mag doesn't capitalize this shit, and made a big deal about dropping the "I". You'd think a professor of E-commerce marketing would be more in touch with the medium he's supposed to be an expert in.
• This sentence: "Fellow educators, feel free to e-mail this to your students, add to your syllabus and use in class." from his page is a grammatical nightmare. And maybe there is a software out there that can tell him not to use light purple text anymore?
• Why the hatin' on Slashdot? Is there a better site that does what they do?
• There's also this interesting critique about MS Word as a writing tool by Matthew Fuller. It's kind of amazing how Word inhibits the process of writing but has become so ingrained that we don't really notice.
• Internet is capitalized because it is a specific network that you are connecting to. If the internet had an owner, they could do the trendy thing and name it "internet" and then the lower case usage would become correct. Wired is not the arbiter of technical grammar. There is no arbiter of technical grammar. Which is one reason that pedants and the OC love the Internet so much. As for the article itself, it is complete crap. Despite whatever opinions about the product you hold, it is marketed and sold as a professional grade text editor and word processor. Thus it stands to reason that the functions it provides caters to the intended audience. As the article mentioned, the grammar check functionality seems to work well for the most part when used by people who you would assume have at least a basic competency in English grammar. A simple analogue: This graphing calculator on my desk only provides the correct answer to the complex problem I am trying to solve if I know enough to enter the correct equation, or am clever enough to research the proper equation to use. Another: Having a Nissan SUV does not necessarily mean that my life will become "extreme" or anymore exciting than it already is. Another: Having a hammer does not mean that I am able to frame a house.
• Internet is capitalized because it is a specific network that you are connecting to. Wrong. Internet is capitalized in that sentence because it starts the sentence. In other positions, it is rapidly moving from a proper to a common noun -- not because of logic or ownership or anything like that, but because that's how people decide to use it, one by one, based on reason or whim or anything at all. Once enough of them write it with a lower-case i (as I have for a long time now), it is lower-case, and not all the pedants or monkeys in the world can restore its capital I.
• Boykot spel chek!
• If I understand you correctly, languagehat, "internet" avoids the problems that came with using "kleenex" for whatever wasn't the branded tissue, or "xerox" for what wasn't the unbranded copy process? I think the issue arises when people start using a company name for a generic set of products. Has anyone trademarked "Internet"? If not, I can still avoid excessive use of the shift key.
• The Internet vs. an internet (lifted from dictionary.com) The Internet (note capital "I") is the largest internet (with a small "i") in the world. It is a three level hierarchy composed of backbone networks, mid-level networks, and stub networks. These include commercial(.com or .co), university (.ac or .edu) and other research networks (.org, .net) and military (.mil) networks and span many different physical networks around the world with various protocols, chiefly the Internet Protocol.
• this interesting critique about MS Word as a writing tool That is the strangest use of the word "interesting" I have ever seen. And it appears dictionary.com is talking out its Ass (capital A), the largest ass (small a) in the world. I see no reason to start capitalizing nouns in the middle of sentences based on their bizzare concept of big Internets and small internets. No one on Earth has ever said "an internet" because there is only one- by definition it is connected to everything else, that's what makes it the internet, not an intranet or private network.
• Full justify a page of 12 point print in Word and then tell me it's a professional anything.
• The "Internet" vs. "internet" argument is only really relevant to engineers who build and manage internets. I work on large and small private internets every day and it makes a big difference whether or not a given internet is connected to the Internet. I capitalize where relevant, which is usually in technical documents, but network engineers like myself are far outnumbered by people like drjimmy11 who wouldn't know an IP packet if it bit them in the ass (small "a"). Oh, and right on Wolof.
• Wolof: Hey, I only said it is marketed and sold as such, I never said that it is The Omega of word processing. The way Word can sometimes seem to actively desire and try to unformat my formatting has angered me greatly on far too many occasions. drjimmy: I beg to differ. In fact as you may be able to guess, I have used the term "an internet". Obviously, after we set aside the ass-end-up talk from W about the internets - we can realize that although Bush is an ill-informed douchebag, several thousand internets exist. This does include the Internet that we're using to access Monkeyfilter. "When two or more networks are connected for exchanging data or resources, they become an internetwork (or internet). ... "Note: Do not confuse the term internet (lowercase i) with the Internet (uppercase I). The first is a generic term used to mean an interconnection of networks. The second is the name of a specific worldwide network." -Data Communications and Networking, Behrouz A. Forouzan, page 613. Or, you can read it for yourself in another book. languagehat: See above. Also, you are correct in that the unwashed masses can change the common use; however, as long as people have to scurry around building boxes and writing bits of code to keep the Internet running, there is a difference between Internet and internet. Mexican: Glad I'm not alone...
• Not snarking at you, geekpdx, snarking at Word.
• It's like the difference between the white house next door and the White House in DC. Or the difference between the great big reef that's acting as a barrier over there and the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The question here boils down to 'can we consider the Internet a proper noun?' And I for one, seeing no other appropriate substitute, consider the Internet as the proper noun/name for this huge living mechanism that affects so many billions of people around the Earth (not to be mistaken with an earth). anyway, i couldn't care less what gets capitalized in a blog or an email or most other places really. For formal writing, however, i'll stick with the big I. if the Vatican is a proper noun, the Internet deserves equal, if not greater, weight. Wired News, on the other hand, thinks that. . .
• oops. missed caution live frogs link up there.
• the fuck i am capatalizing internet.
• Full justify a page of 12 point print in Word and then tell me it's a professional anything. I don't understand this (like so many things). Grateful explanation from somebody - in 12pt, fully justified, please!
• (Not that I don't fucking hate Word, btw)
• quidnunc - I don't understand that either. If fully justified formatting looks unprofessional, then why does the New York Times do it? If 12 pt font is unprofessional it's news to me. I find that I don't hate Word so much as tolerate it. The reviewing feature is pretty useful to me, as it allows me to have my advisor mark up my writings nicely. Grammar check I turn off as every goddamn sentence in a science paper is passive tense, and I get annoyed at the program for suggesting to me that it is a problem. The office assistant, during install, is marked as "Not available" and would be excised from the install disk with a penknife if I knew exactly which bits to scratch into oblivion. Not being able to set a keyboard shortcut for "paste what is on the clipboard without formatting" however is making me go cross-eyed. And I'm still not going to capitalize "internet". I only recently started capitalizing anything here in the first place. As languagehat said, it's becoming common usage. Language evolves, and we must let it, or we will end up as pedants annoyed that the term "gay" no longer means "carefree and happy". I understand the reluctance to change, I personally dislike the use of the word "organic" to refer to pesticide-free produce (every carbon-based life form is organic by definition, no matter how many pesticides I spray on them - heck, the pesticides themselves are composed of organic molecules!) but I grit my teeth and allow it to continue.
• If fully justified formatting looks unprofessional ... I thought perhaps Wolfy's criticism was targeted at the software, not the resultant page - i.e. he may be suggesting the way it justifies is shite, rather than the look of 12pt justified print ... however, I have no clue (obviously).
• I find that I don't hate Word so much as tolerate it. That's a damn good way to put it.
• "Note: Do not confuse the term internet (lowercase i) with the Internet (uppercase I). The first is a generic term used to mean an interconnection of networks. The second is the name of a specific worldwide network." -Data Communications and Networking, Behrouz A. Forouzan, page 613. OK, you guys nailed me on that. Oddly enough I work as a programmer and have never heard that. I think what I said was accurate from a layman's point of view though, if you are not writing for a highly technical audience. When most people talk about "on the internet," they are referring to a general location, it's out there somewhere in cyberspace, like "it's out in the street," or "it's in the forest." I think that's the mental concept the average person has of "the internet" - they're usally not referring to the global network itself as a thing but saying that data is located on a website and not on a local machine or a piece of paper.
• caution live frogs Not being able to set a keyboard shortcut for "paste what is on the clipboard without formatting" however is making me go cross-eyed. You actually can do that. Record it as a macro, then assign it as a keyboard shortcut. Email me if you want more step-by-step instructions.
• MonkeyFilter: I grit my teeth and allow it to continue. Ain't no tite-ass perfesser gonna tell ME how to spel intarweb!
• he may be suggesting the way it justifies is shite Correct! It looks bloody awful compared to a real type-setting program. The "kerning" is all over the place. It hurts to read!
• Ah! OK now I dig it :)