[Chapter-delegates] Fw: The Future Internet

[Narelle.Clark at csiro.au]

Narelle Clark
Research Director
Networking Technologies Laboratory
CSIRO ICT Centre

----- Original Message -----
From: Clark, Narelle (ICT Centre, Marsfield)
To: Louis Houle <Louis.Houle at oricom.ca>
Sent: Fri Jun 12 15:26:47 2009
Subject: RE: [Chapter-delegates]  The Future Internet



Aahh pedantry, or more precisely, nitpicking. My other specialist area. :-)

"Internet" is correct when we are talking about a specific public network: _the_ public Internet. Correspondingly we talk about the PSTN when we talk about _the_ Public Switched Telephone Network. If we were talking about the generic, such as an internet application, or any internet protocol based network, we don't use a capital "I".

It's a question of naming a specific item rather than the general: "a" (or in this case "an") versus "the".

Cette vs un :-)

This is (human) language independent, in my view.

It's not the same as a company name being used to refer to a class of items (eg where people call "vacuum cleaners" by the term "Hoovers").

The Internet Society is something else again, and we work with both the generic and the specific... :-)

This is therefore not the same as comparing with 'post' or 'telegraph' unless we were referring to a specific postal service by name, eg Australia Post, or Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (if my memory serves me well).

> From: Louis Houle
> Sent: Friday, 12 June 2009 6:33 AM
<snippage> 
> In my mind, a capital «I» should 
> be used in context. Why is it a proper name ? Because of a 
> copyright ? 
> The Internet Society is the name of an institution; it sure deserves 
> capital letters. In some other cases also. But everywhere on the 
> «I»nternet, people talk about the «i»nternet. Better get used 
> to it: the 
> more we go, the more the proper name will be written with a small 
> letter, no matter how many xerox we send to the ITU to protest, or 
> kleenex we  weep in, no band-aid exist to cure that integration into 
> commun languages across the world. Better have a coke in the 
> «frigidaire»  ;-)


All the best



Narelle