[ih] 'internet' and "Internet"

[Mark Goodge]

On 08/08/2023 16:16, John Levine via Internet-history wrote:
> It appears that Noel Chiappa via Internet-history <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu> said:
>>     > From: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
>>
>>     > You know, sometimes it's time to let go.
>> ...
> 
>> The fact that 'ordinary' people (such as the afore-mentioned idiots at the
>> AP) are confused in their terminology is not relevant. ...
> 
> I understand the difference, but in retrospect, it wasn't a great idea
> to come up with two terms with different meanings that differ only in
> capitalization. (How does one pronounce internet and Internet?)

Indeed. I don't know about other countries (and, in particular, I don't 
know about US law in this context), but, in English law, words in legal 
documents are explicitly case-insensitive. So "internet" and "Internet" 
(and, for that matter, "InterNet", "interNet" and "INTERNET", and any 
other variations thereof) are always treated in law as being exactly the 
same word.

Moreover, "internet", like any other word, is always capitalised at the 
start of a sentence (unless you are e.e. cummings), and, in many 
publication house styles, capitalised when part of a headline or title 
(aka title case).

Now, of course, there are words which typically have different meanings 
when capitalised in the run of text. My own name, Mark, is one of them - 
"mark" usually means something different. There's a common quiz question 
about the only word which changes its pronunciation when capitalised 
(the answer is polish/Polish, for those who haven't seen it before). But 
these are simple coincidences caused by homophones where one is a proper 
noun and the other is not. So in cases where the normally lower case 
version appears in title case or at the start of a sentence, you can 
usually still distinguish by context.

That doesn't apply to internet/Internet. They're not merely unrelated 
homophones, because they both have the same etymology and, mostly, mean 
the same thing (an interconnected network). And that means you can't 
easily distinguish between them by context when they're in title case.

So trying to maintain a distinction between them simply isn't going to 
fly, out there in the world of people who use English in its normal, 
non-technical sense and follow normal, non-technical rules of grammar. 
Which is, these days, the vast majority of people who actually use the 
Internet. Or the internet.

I still capitalise Internet, even in a context where everybody else is 
merrily using it in lower case. But I've been around long enough to be 
the kind of contrary old git who also gets annoyed at people who ask a 
barista "can I get..." when what they mean is "please will you get 
me...". And don't get me started on the way that "hacker" now means what 
"cracker" once did. But. Language changes. And, sometimes, those who use 
language wisely can recognise when some of our own previous choices were 
suboptimal. Trying to enforce a distinction between Internet and 
internet is precisely one such error that's best left in the past.

> Rather than telling the entire world that they are stupid, which is
> not a great way to change minds, perhaps we can come up with a snappy
> memorable term for a disconnected group of networks that exchange IP
> packets that doesn't look and sound exactly like a word that means
> something else. As already noted, there are lots of them in the IoT
> world, at least I hope there are.

Absolutely.

Mark