The Illuminated Donkey

I Kid. I'm a Kidder. Mike Whybark, whose taste in links is far superior than his taste in flicks (though only time will tell if our Adaptation argument will outlast our Big Lebowski brouhaha, which just celebrated its 4th anniversary), comments on the New York Times piece "Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do," which takes a look at the growing controversy regarding the capitalization (or non-) of tech terms like "I/internet" and "W/website" (or even "W/web site").

[Unfortunately, Mr. Whybark began experiencing technical difficulties shortly after posting the above comments, and as longtime fans of Mr. Whybark are aware, technical difficulties means weeks of voluminous posts packed with jargontastic language, not to mention paragraphs consisting of one long sentence with two separate semicolon breaks. We also get little vignettes like the following:

[O]ur Apex AD-1600 DVD player died as we switched disks while watching the extended edition DVD of The Fellowship of the Ring on Xmas just before heading out to see The Two Towers. Fortunately, we were able to play the remainder on my G4 tower...

which might just be the geekiest darn thing I've read since Mike and I were working together, answering e-mails from disgruntled anime fans.

Anyway. The article's an interesting state-of-the-language look at this transitional time for a number of tech terms. Each day we move further away from the origin of our nifty online universe, making the capitalization of web-related terms an anachronism, like "Base-Ball" or "Phonograph." But while I agree with Mike and Scot Hacker that "internet and "website" are logical and probably inevitable, I worry that it's a slippery slope from those changes to things like "email" and bizarre compound words with CapitalLetters floating around in the middle somewhere.

Of course, if an increasing majority of people continue to use the familiar, lowercase terms, then those will become de facto correct, no matter what the dictionary mavens eventually decide.

Update: the comments section of Mike's post on this subject is getting some play.