Leith on language
Sam Leith
For “whom” the bell tolls
Internet: capital I or lower-case I? Internet or internet? No doubt Prospect’s stylebook has a ruling on the subject. But it’s a matter of some pride for BuzzFeed’s copy chief Emmy J Favilla that back in 2012, when the Associate Press Stylebook and most other arbiters were still insisting on a capital I, she ruled that the word should be lower-case on the unimprovable grounds that “well, capitalising it looked weird.” Last year APS belatedly came round to her point of view.
Every style guide presents a set of rules and preferences—and those rules and preferences help to define a publication’s personality. Simon Heffer’s style guide for the Daily Telegraph, for instance, rules that “Christmas lunch is what most of our readers would eat, not Christmas dinner.” (Charles Moore’s previous style guide for the same publication, more inclusively, troubled to warn that writing that Leeds was “two hours away by train” would not be true for those of the paper’s readers who lived in Leeds.) BuzzFeed’s personality is millennial, internet-savvy and informal—and its style guide reflects that.