I didn’t post this in GQ, because then I’d have people pulling out dictionary definitions distinguishing “intra-” from “inter-”. This is more of a rant than a question.
Having named them “intranets”, is it safe to call them that? Obviously not. Everyone calls them “intruhhhhhhnets” to distinguish them from the Internet, which has dibs on the whole “household word beginning in int- and ending in -net” thang. This of course irks me to know end, because the same dictionaries which tell us what “intra-” means tell us to put the accent on the first syllable, confusion be damned.
Couldn’t they have called them something else? I mean, if I were to launch a soda, I could call it “Strymine: the tasty new Rap Toison from Boris Bottling”. But no, I wouldn’t, because it wouldn’t sell. Instead of intranets, they could have called them:
intrawebs
companynets
homenets
cyberlocales
or a hundred other things. But nooooooo, they had to pick something that sounds like something else, just to prove how nimble they were with prefixes, and then let the unwashed masses try to figure it out.
I just hope Microsoft never releases a word processer with a name that sounds a lot like “Works”. Or like, if Apple wanted to emphasize to name of of their products to emphasize how great a Performer it was, and decided to leave the -er off the end and replace it with an -a, so nobody could spell it. Think of the confusion that would cause.