August 16th, 2004

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Words
10 Comments »

Banal Grammar Discussion to Follow

About three months ago, I start switching from ‘Web site’ to ‘website’ in personal and business writing. My original argument for a capital ‘W’ was that the Web was a specific place, like Montana or Sooke, and therefore deserved a capital W. In fact, as you see, I still write ‘Web’ with a capital ‘W’, but have caved on ‘website’. Mostly, I caved because I know that compound words tend to converge. Somebody with a linguistics degree is welcome to expound on this phenomenon, as I can’t. For example, I’ve also switched from ‘e-mail’ to ‘email’. I’m happy, then, to write ‘website’ instead of ‘Web site’.

You’ve suffered the previous two paragraphs because I’m a pedant and because of this Slashdot thread, which indicates that Wired magazine will no longer capitalize ‘web’, ‘net’, and ‘internet’.

While I’m on the subject of capitalization and technology terms, I note that William Gibson does not capitalize ‘hotmail’ in Pattern Recognition. Why do you suppose that is?

Comments: 10 Responses so far

Anonymous
August 16th, 2004
12:14 pm

I agree with you, althought I’m still trying to keep “e-mail” in my vocabulary.

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heather
August 16th, 2004
12:33 pm

i’ve always used “email” and “website”. then again, i don’t capitalize much of anything, unless it’s for emphasis or clarity. sorry, darren!

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Derek
August 16th, 2004
12:59 pm

I made a similar decision just over a year ago, but I still can’t bring myself to use “email” instead of “e-mail,” probably because I once found out that “émail” is an actual French word for “enamel.”

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Andrea
August 16th, 2004
1:11 pm

I use “the Web”, but website, webpage, and so on. This is because a website or webpage may or may not be part of the Web. Such elements could be in an intranet or accessible through another network.

As for “the Internet”, “the Net” and “the Web”, I suppose the problem is that these terms are really losing their original meaning. I suspect people really mean they were “online” or “using Internet protocols” in many circumstances. They could be using the Internet or Internet 2. However, if they mean they’re really on “the Internet” or one of the other specific pronouns, they should be using the definite article and capital.

As for “email” and other hyphenated terms, I was an early adopter, probably because I started using email in the 80s.

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Sue
August 16th, 2004
10:56 pm

I think Mr. Gibson’s lack of capitalization is a reflection of the “slightly future” time setting of Pattern Recognition. He obviously sees eye to eye with you on the inevitability of compound word convergence and de-capitalization.

It does make me shudder, however. I’d rather NOT see “hotmail” become a catch-all word for email in the same way that Kleenex is a catch-all for facial tissue. Not that there’s anything wrong with hotmail as a word (aside from being two letters longer than necessary)… I just don’t like seeing brand names being accepted as generic terms.

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Sue
August 16th, 2004
10:58 pm

In relation to this, I would love it if companies would stop saying “Log on to our website at http://www.whatever.com.” In this day and age of high-speed “always on” internet access, who really “logs on” anymore? Or is that just me assuming everyone has the same kind of access as me?

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Andrea
August 16th, 2004
11:04 pm

Sue,
I concur. Why not “Visit whatever.com?” Of course, there’s the rare instance where www is needed, but that’s the exception.

Andrea
exit
c:\
quit

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Dean
August 17th, 2004
5:35 am

The ‘log on to our website’ thing has always bugged me. To me, ‘logging on’ means providing a username and password. In fact, we used to call a user name a ‘logon’, as in ‘What’s your logon?’

You don’t ‘log on’ to most websites. To me, when somebody tells me to log on to their website, they’re telling me that they have one of those annoying registration systems, and I therefore avoid their website like the plague.

Hmmm. That’s another interesting phenomenon, although I may be more sensitive to it than most people: what do you call the name you provide to a a system?

User ID - I’ve seen this one a lot.
Username - I’m currently working on a system where the user identification string is called UserID, Username, Name, and User. Very annoying.
ID - ick.
Logon - an old term, from green-screen mini/mainframe days.
Account - ditto. ‘Log on to the dbadmin account’. This one has stuck, ‘logon’ hasn’t.
Screen Name - this, I think, comes from AOL. I’m old enough to remember the flood of AOL users and the shrieks of outrage when AOL connected to the net. I’ve always hated the term ’screen name’.

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Darren James Harkness
August 17th, 2004
6:36 am

Not to be a pedant myself, but there’s only one paragraph above… ;)

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bree
August 17th, 2004
8:33 am

I’ve always seen it as Web, website, internet, email and so on. I saw the unnecessary capitalization and hyphenization as quaint, kind of like reading books from the turn of the century and all kinds of nouns were capitalized and goodbye was hyphenated.

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