There are a lot of examples in astronomy, where some object was originally named as itself, and later served as the prototype for a class of objects which were given the same name. In such cases, the original one (often “ours”, in some sense) gets capitalized, while the others are lowercase.
Sigh, that was a mouthful… Perhaps examples would be in order? One might say “We haven’t seen a supernova anywhere in the Galaxy since the Middle Ages”, in which case one is referring to our own galaxy, otherwise known as the Milky Way (which is really just a translation of “galaxy”). On the other hand, one might say “The Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf galaxy which orbits ours.”, in which case “galaxy” is just used as a label for the general category, so it’s lower-case. The same sort of distinction holds for “moon”, “sun”, and “universe” (in the latter case, the lower-case universes are usually theoretical models, like the de Sitter universe).
When I was growing up, one always capitalized words like President, either when referring to the leader of the country or the head of a company. Most style guides no loner do this. As **mwbrooks ** noted, we still capitalize the title of the individual, as in President Bush or Vice President Cheney, but formal standard is to no longer use a capital when speaking of the president as an office rather than a person.
I think you might have that backwards. As I understand it, the internet concept (lowercase) came before the idea of a global Internet (capitalized), and the latter idea is what Internet Protocol was developed for and named after. Unfortunately I don’t have the book I read that in any more, and the Wikipedia article is unclear on the terminology.
I’m a copy editor by profession and I say it should be lower case. (And, more important, so does the house style where I work.) Using a capital letter looks needlessly prissy and old-fashioned IMHO, as if drawing attention to this new and out-of-the-ordinary wonder, the Internet!
It’s become such a commonplace term that capping it up would be like writing “Television” or “Radio”.
TCP/IP was substantially developed by 1983 and ARPA funded development of an implementation of it in ARPANET, which had gotten its start about 1969[sup]1,2[/sup]. It was this ARPANET that eventually became the Internet. TCP/IP came first.
Miller, Philip, TCP/IP Explained, Digital Press:Boston, 1997
There is always room for differences on matters of style, although I’m not following your rationale. “Internet” is not capitalized to draw attention to it as an out-of-the-ordinary wonder. It’s to distinguish a particular network from others that are also properly known as internets, in the same way we use “White House.” It is a white house, after all, but it’s somehow different that all those other ones and we find it useful and important to make the distinction. Other network names are capitalized as well, such as the Automated Clearing House (US banking network). That a term becomes commonplace does not cause it to be demoted from its capitalization status.
Internet-with-a-capital-I is a proper name for a specific entity with well-defined boundaries and its own governance, such as the issuing of IP addresses and domain names (although domain names are not really part of the network definition). “Television” and “radio” are the names of generic media, like “book,” not cohesive entities. Some people capitalize it to distinguish it from other networks of computers. But nothing says you have to.
Same here. One of my favorite (favourite?) style manuals starts off with British English as a baseline convention, then turns to the Chicago Manual, and finally presents a sizable chunk of in-house exceptions. **I*nternet is one of them. Of note, the Economist does not capitalize. To someone who intuitively thinks it should be, it looks off.
Turn off the spellcheck-as-you-type feature or whatever it’s called. In my experience, 90% of those annoying red lines are false positives, and would drive me mad if I ever used Microsoft Word (which I don’t).
No one today uses the word “internet” to mean anything other than “the internet.” As far as I know, no one ever has (except perhaps at the dawn). A collection of networks is called a WAN (wide-area network, made up of several LANs or local area networks). It can also be called an intranet (which means any substantial network that’s separated from the internet) or just a network.
Of course, all these terms are loose and mixed up. For example, “intranet” is often used to refer to private websites on your network, not the network itself. Which is ironic, because it parallels the usage of “internet” to mean the “world wide web.”
In any case, capitalization definately is about drawing attention to things, and some people will look at you weird if you draw attention to the internet in writing. Certainly if you’re writing about technology. Admittedly, sometimes it feels like attention should be drawn, and I had to go back and erase a couple of capital I’s when writing this post. It’s too bad we can’t go around capitalizing (or bolding or italicizing) things randomly in formal writing like we do online (or did back in the Day). It’s so stifling.
I’m a copy editor by profession too. Alas, the newspaper for which I am a columnist insists on “Internet,” so I must capitalize it. I hope this will soon cease.
Not at all. I speak and write a little German, and I find it quaint and am fond of it. Plus if I don’t know a word, at least I know if it’s a noun or not.