With its own strange way of expressing itself, the AP Style Guide will change its guidance of Internet to internet on June 1. “We will lowercase internet effective June 1, when the 2016 Stylebook launches,” it offered via Twitter, while turning lowercase into a verb.
This shift takes us away from our calling out the internet’s uniqueness with a capital letter. We no longer need to worry about the Information Superhighway, or Cyberspace, or a Series of Tubes. Or Internets. It’s deemed to be just an everyday thing like the telephone or television and no longer needing such elevation.
But are we happy about that?
Probably not. Inevitably we get attached to what we first know. It’s chaos out there and the Twitterverse is ablaze with reaction to this news and talk of open rebellion. And by rebellion I mean that a dozen people have posted humorous comments on the AP Twitter feed. And there are now also rallying cries to save the hyphen in e-mail while others want to create single words like voicemail.
Personally, I like keeping things as they were. Case in point, my local Chinese Restaurant in Clapham South in London used to be a vacuum cleaner sales shop but they kept the name. Maybe it was cheaper on signage. And so it remains today, thirty years later, as pictured below.
