“Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the ‘I’ in internet,” writes Tony Long, Wired News’ copy-editing chief. “At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was.”
So what do we care? Wired produced the hardback book Wired Style in 1999. Although very out of date, it was the only guide of its time to cover a lot of the new terminology. This decision will (might?) influence a lot of writing.
In 2000 Wired magazine declared that the hyphen belongs in e-mail.
Personally, I never capitalized internet or web unless a spell check insisted for something being done at work. The move to email was recent, and Wired helped justify it: conventional wisdom [is] that “new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word.” Almost everyone knows what email is, and it’s about time it just became its own word.
A similar spelling subject was recently discussed (actually emailed) with a friend: edress, e-dress, eddress or e-ddress. The issue is slightly different because the ‘a’ was being deleted from address, so it’s no longer just two words being merged. There were, and are, no standards to check What Is Right, but a few semi-useful references did surface:
- PseudoDictionary
- SlangSite
- RealDictionary
- Webster’s-online – not to be confused with Merriam-Webster
