Laura’s Blog

The New York Times has updated its Manual of Style and Usage.

Here are several changes they’ve made to online-related terms:

World Wide Web is now known as the web with a lowercase w. (Have you noticed that very few advertisements include “www” in front of a web address? Most of us know that the “www” is a given; when referring people to our websites, we just say, “Go to BloggingBistro.com.”

website is lowercase, one word.

Internet, however, is capitalized.

email no longer uses a hyphen, nor is the e capitalized.

But e-book and e-commerce retain their hyphens. (Seems kind of random, doesn’t it?)

The New York Times does not allow their writers and editors to use friend and Google as verbs, as in:

“Let me Google that” or “I am friending you on Facebook.”

However, they are allowed to use those terms as verbs “in light contexts or direct quotations, or for special effect.”

My favorite: They’ve added a new entry that clarifies that a blog is NOT a post (or article) on a blog.

A blog is the publication onto which you publish a post, just as a newspaper is the publication in which an article is published. (That’s one of my pet peeves; I’m so glad they’ve clarified the correct usage for the masses!)

Question: If you could suggest a change to The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, what would you propose?