What do we think?I think the shift to talking about internets rather than The Internet might actually be happening. A couple years after Bush called it the internets, we all laughed, and it became a kind of joke to pluralize: the internets, internets, interwebs. But then just this week [...]
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I’d be interested in hearing whether people notice usage of internets in a not-tongue-in-cheek way, or if this still seems to call attention to itself as an ironic formulation.
English has changed since its beginning as the tongue of the Anglo-Saxons, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, and now us. The process of change hasn't stopped. In this blog, we observe the language changing all around us. We don't opine (much) about these changes; we just note them as we see them ...
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Irony and evolvery
On polyglot conspiracy, Lauren observes:
isn't there a whole aspect of the Net which is not the World Wide Web? I mean all sites that come under the http address? So in that sense that is already more than one Inter-Net.
ReplyDeletesatz, I think there is a single Internet that supports multiple protocols, of which http is just one. As I understand it, the capital-I Internet is the conglomeration of many (many, many) smaller networks, hence is a (singular) inter-network. Dunno.
ReplyDeleteHowever and in any event, it seems to me that the term "internets" is unlikely in most cases to be an attempt to capture this technical subtlety. I believe, as suggested in all this, that it began as a mistake, then an ironic commentary on those with less sophisticated technical chops (ie, essentially a ticket into an elite), and now seems to be kind of dropping its ironic overtones.
So in one sense, I guess, the term is coming around to represent something that might be technically true. Hmmm. :-)
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ReplyDeleteI think "internets," as used in the ironic sense, got a boost from Ted Stevens's infamous "tubes" speech.
ReplyDeleteI have yet to come across the plural form in a serious sense. It strikes me that such usage would be as bad as "universes," although I suppose if a completely separate network were created, and the two didn't connect at all, I'd accept the pluralism.
But you know that such a second network would not long remain completely separate, and then people would talk about "interconnecting" them and "intercomparing" their merits.
And then I'd be really mad.