Land o’ Goshen, the Associated Press Stylebook is officially ditching “Web site” for “website.”
Maybe now the copy editors at The New Yorker will consider uncapping the “i” in “internet.”
For years now, I’ve been tripping over The New Yorker’s insistence on capitalizing the “i” in internet. It offends me. Who decided “internet” is a proper noun? It’s a thing, like a telephone exchange or a radio network, and who capitalizes telephone or radio? No one, that’s who!
The New Yorker is famous for its high editing standards, but some of those standards are eccentric (like the toothache-inducing substitution of “vender” for “vendor”), and they are strictly in-house . . . they don’t publish their stylebook. The AP Stylebook, however, is available for purchase, and has long been my bible. When I reported for duty to the US Special Operations Command in 1987, I was issued a 1984 edition of the AP Stylebook. Everything I wrote for USSOCOM had to be in compliance with the AP Stylebook, and I learned to love its simple alphabetical layout. Here’s a short sample:
lectern, podium, pulpit, rostrum A speaker stands behind a lectern, on a podium or rostrum, or in the pulpit.
Isn’t that easy? And how elegant! Here’s another:
palate, palette, pallet Palate is the roof of the mouth. A palette is an artist’s paint board. A pallet is a bed.
I decided to order the latest version of the AP Stylebook, so long as they haven’t caved on gantlet/gauntlet. They haven’t. Associated Press, my check’s in the mail!