A Word, Please: A significant change to the Internet

July 8, 2016 5:17 PM PT

It’s official: The Internet is over. So is the Web.

It’s hard to believe, I know. Just last year, it seemed these two powerhouses ruled the world. But as of this summer, they’re done. Kaput. Over. Dead as e-mail.

Meet their replacements: the internet and the web. You’ll see these substitutes anywhere the Associated Press Stylebook is used.

At the beginning of June, the latest edition of the AP Stylebook went into effect, ushering in style changes such as a lowercase I in internet and lowercase the W in web.

“The changes reflect a growing trend toward lowercasing both words, which have become generic terms,” AP standards editor Thomas Kent told Poynter, a St. Petersburg, Fla.-based journalism institute.

These new capitalization rules are just a few of the changes to the new AP guide, which include allowing “spokesperson” where before there were only spokesmen and spokeswomen and allowing DJ instead of deejay on first reference.

The results will be seen far and wide, even if they won’t be noticed. Many news outlets, magazines, wire services, business publishers and, of course, the Associated Press itself follow this style book. So the official guideline for those outlets is now to lowercase internet and web.

But here’s the thing most people don’t get: Neither AP nor the publishers of the Chicago Manual nor the Modern Language Assn. nor any other stylebook publisher makes rules about language. They make rules about their respective editing styles — styles that apply to anyone who wishes to follow them — and to no one who doesn’t.

Style guides are playbooks with several objectives, a main one being consistency. For publishers, following a style helps avoid the appearance that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Without these guidelines, you could have one article that reads “A 9-year-old in Fresno, Calif., emailed the deejay on Tuesday” next to one that reads “A nine year old in Fresno, CA, e-mailed the DJ on 6/28.”

Many big names in publishing prefer to go their own way. The New York Times has its own style guide. So does the Los Angeles Times, which is similar to AP but has different rules for percentages, how to format phone numbers and other little publishing conventions you’d never notice unless you were being paid to.

What’s more, each style guide has its own default dictionary — the reference to which it points users for any matter not covered in the style guide. These dictionaries sometimes disagree with each other. For example, Webster’s New World College Dictionary — AP’s longtime go-to — treats “healthcare” as one word. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate prefers two words, “health care,” which you might hyphenate when you’re using it as an adjective “health-care policies.”

So no AP style rule restricts you if you don’t want it to. But it does affect you. The more popular a language convention — say, using “email” instead of “e-mail” — the more ingrained it can become. If these trends gain enough momentum, they can become officially correct, the same way “teen-ager” and “good-bye” became “teenager” and “goodbye.” In fact, that’s how “email” continues to emerge as the victor over “e-mail.”

Some people will applaud the changes, arguing that internet and web have been generic terms for years. Others will lament them, perhaps wondering why things have to change at all.

As someone whose job is to enforce style changes, you’d think I would have an opinion. I don’t. On most style points, I’m happy to have someone else make the call. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in charge of deciding when “good-bye” should lose its hyphen, just as I couldn’t have known when Web would become a generic term. I just do what the style guides tell me — right up until they tell me to do something different.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.