Internet vs Internets

January 12, 2005 9:09 AM

When did "the Internet" become "the internets"? Seems a fairly new phenom, but I can't seem to trace it specifically to any one thing/person/place.
posted by WolfDaddy to Writing & Language (26 answers total)

It was our friend President Bush talking about "rumors on the internets", I think.
posted by weston at 9:11 AM on January 12, 2005

It's W's fault.

QUESTIONER: Mr. President, since we continue to police the world, how do you intend to maintain our military presence without reinstituting a draft?

BUSH: Yes, that's a great question. Thanks.

I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. We're not going to have a draft, period. The all- volunteer army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well. It works when we make sure they've got housing, like we have done in the last military budgets.

posted by Saucy Intruder at 9:12 AM on January 12, 2005

President Bush, October 8, 2004
posted by Floydd at 9:12 AM on January 12, 2005

Here's the exact MeFi moment. For, um, more context...
posted by togdon at 9:14 AM on January 12, 2005

Response by poster: Wow, I missed this entirely. '04 was a tough year. Sigh. Thanks, everyone.
posted by WolfDaddy at 9:24 AM on January 12, 2005

The thing is, in an NPR report, a soldier in charge of the PXs in Iraq refered to how prices were usually cheaper on the Internets. I wonder if it's been a regional thing for a while.
posted by drezdn at 9:40 AM on January 12, 2005

Every time I hear someone say "the internets" I am reminded of my days on the tech support line for an Illinois based ISP.

Most common opening line from a caller: "Mhay innernet is broken."

Now I know they really did have their very own Internet!
posted by FlamingBore at 9:56 AM on January 12, 2005

It's a Texas/southern thing, I think. Kind of like "Wal-Marts" or "Pizza Huts". As in, "We're going to Wal-Marts and then Pizza Huts."

Ick.
posted by amandaudoff at 10:02 AM on January 12, 2005

IIRC, "internets" stems from the circumstance of military terms: as in that people who have a military background or trained in the forces have a very clear auxiliary internet that is a secure network specifically for them. Or something like that. I'm too lazy to google. Nor do i know anyone in the military to confirm.
posted by naxosaxur at 10:11 AM on January 12, 2005

amandaudoff: I don't think so--you missed the punctuation there. That would be Wal-Mart's or Pizza Hut's (i.e. the store owned by Wal-Mart and the restaurant owned by Pizza Hut). Internets is a different animal.

naxosaxur: It's possible, but I doubt that Bush was thinking about this when he used the term.
posted by grouse at 10:19 AM on January 12, 2005

I'm from the South, and everyone I know says "Internet." So don't blame it on us.
posted by Medieval Maven at 10:20 AM on January 12, 2005

This has become, at least so far as I have used it and seen others use it, a joke based off of Bush's line in the debate.

"Internets" is the new "InterWeb"
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:29 AM on January 12, 2005

An internet is just a collection of two or more networks that are connected together. So in theory there can be an infinite number of internets (naxosaxur brings up a well known large one).
posted by mmascolino at 10:33 AM on January 12, 2005

I can't figure out why has no one pointed out that the Internet is just an instance of what O'Rielly's DNS/Bind book calls "internets" (any group of networked computers is an internet) - and that W was inadvertently accurate in his assesment, as rumors and discussion surely also exist in smaller, private, diverse arrays of internets.
I only learned this recently, too late to combat the backlash. But I haven't heard anyone point this out on any internet at all! And the internets are full of folks that know all about DNS/Bind and stuffs.
posted by 31d1 at 10:36 AM on January 12, 2005

ahahaha! wow. It's like "cromulent" becoming a word.
Around here it's just been used to mock GWB.

(any group of networked computers is an internet)

back when I worked in an office, we called our private network an "intranet". "The Internet" is the public domain network, and although there may be portions which can be restricted via passwords, etc, they are not strictly speaking "removed" from the rest of the internet, but just restricted. If you have the right password/info, you can still get onto them from any other machine with online access. The only way you could really have separate internets would be to use different kinds of machines that could not talk to each other.
posted by mdn at 10:45 AM on January 12, 2005

what O'Rielly's DNS/Bind book calls "internets"

For some reason I doubt that W has read O'Reilly's DNS/Bind book, unless it is this O'Reilly you're talking about.

_{(31d1, I did see your "inadvertently", but couldn't pass up the opportunity.)}
posted by tuxster at 11:26 AM on January 12, 2005

There's an internet (a collection of interconnected networks), and there's The Internet (the global internet we all use to read and post to MeFi), just like there's a moon (a body orbiting a planet), and there's The Moon (where the Mooninites come from).

There are many internets, but there is only one Internet.
posted by dirigibleman at 11:46 AM on January 12, 2005

And there are extranets (intranets that you share with external groups).
posted by kirkaracha at 12:07 PM on January 12, 2005

mdn, I'm with you. All employees have access to the Intranet, but only some have access to The Internet.

(Outside of tech-geekery) For the most part, when people talk about The Internet they are really talking about the World Wide Web.
posted by raedyn at 1:13 PM on January 12, 2005

Response by poster: And don't forget than on The Moon they pull nerd's pants down and they are spanked with Moon Rocks! Not to mention the 5,000 dimensions.

Sorry, I just love the Mooninites. Quad laser 4eva!

(...and, for me, the DNS/Bind book's never been an O'Reilly book, it's "the dragonfly book". Just to cloud the issue further.)
posted by WolfDaddy at 1:14 PM on January 12, 2005

Internet2, but again, I don't think he meant this when he said "Internets".
posted by tetsuo at 5:08 PM on January 12, 2005

I think it may be significant that "the internets" as a phrase previously existed, as slang for "dot com stocks". q.v. To President M.B.A., the internet is not a third place -- it's a portfolio.
posted by dhartung at 11:31 PM on January 12, 2005

It's like "cromulent" becoming a word.

When -- in 1400!?

(I can't give you the C&V, but many well-versed English Lit majors should be able to quote verses including "cromulent" from Shakespeare.)
posted by lodurr at 11:39 AM on January 13, 2005

(I can't give you the C&V, but many well-versed English Lit majors should be able to quote verses including "cromulent" from Shakespeare.)

you'll have to do better than that. It isn't in the OED or Webster's, and my googling for shakespeare + cromulent came up only with "The Cromulent Shakespeare Co." of Minneapolis, which aims to "Embiggen the Bard", so they are clearly in on the joke. If it was originally an old english word that was reborn in a new form, that would be quite strange and interesting, but I see no evidence beyond your word at this point.
posted by mdn at 7:21 PM on January 13, 2005

The answer I heard (don't recall where, was probably NPR) is what naxosaxr said. Government workers with a high enough security clearance actually have two terminals on their desk, one which connects to a secure internet and the other to the regular internet. The term "internets" is regularly employed.
posted by Manjusri at 2:08 AM on January 14, 2005

Oh no, daddy, don't believe these last posterers! The Internets came from dubya's inane speak-stuff from that debate where he, in retrospective must have, utterly crushed that illiterate guy from France.

In further rebuttal, I've known some people that worked in secret, secret places with many different nets, subnets, VPNs, intranets, and a number of internets. They varied between "if I tell you, I'll have to kill you" need-to-know-only-classified-top-secret, to "treason-boy" classified-top-secret, to "you've been reassigned to Afganistan" classified-secret, to "ssssh, don't tell anyone" formerly-classified-secret, to "geez, you're really not supposed to link to that from Metafilter" formerly-classified-formerly-secret.

But even they only had the Internet 1 and Internet 2. And the silly nonsence dubya was talking about was on the good old Internet 1. Cheney hasn't told him about #2 (and we haven't told Cheney about the other Internets -- ssssh!)
posted by theatrical matriarch at 1:50 AM on February 3, 2005