As you may have noticed, it is difficult for bloggers, myself included, to refer to the internet without employing some sort of cutesy modification to the term. I do not fully understand why. It's not as if mere reference to the internet is so uncool that irony is required (like plastic baggies for dogshit) to avoid becoming stained by association. This Wikipedia entry on "interweb," which reads like the Onion parody of a Wikipedia entry ("Earlier uses in science fiction of the term include the Babylon 5 episodes..."), will cure you of any desire to join the nerds' smug mockery.
I have failed to settle on a pet term. Possibilities include the following:
- Famous malapropisms and misapprehensions: "the internets" is a favorite. Also "series of tubes."
- Apocryphal or invented malapropisms: "interweb," "world wide net," "infranet."
- Quotation marks: ""internet.""
- Unnecessary capitalization: "InterNet."
- Unnecessary hyphenation: "inter-net."
- Combinations of the above: "Inter-Net," "World-Wide-Infra-Net," "InterWeb."
But I have considered and rejected all of them. I shall call it "Gary."
