Internets (colloquialism)

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"Internets" (sometimes "internets") is a Bushism-turned-catch phrase used humorously to portray the speaker as ignorant about the Internet or about technology in general, or as having a provincial or folksy attitude toward technology (in a similar fashion to portrayals of rednecks' referring to television as "the tee-vee box"). United States President George W. Bush had used the improper pluralization of the word "Internet" publicly during the 2000 election. However, the term gained cachet as an Internet humor meme only following Bush's use of the term in the second presidential election debate on October 8, 2004.

1 Presidential debates
2 Internet and media reaction
3 Older use of “internets”
4 Persistent uses
5 References
6 See also
7 External links

[edit] Presidential debates

Bush referred to publicly funded computer terminals connected to the Internet as "Internets" in the third Gore-Bush presidential debate on October 17, 2000:^[1]

JOYCE CLEAMER, AUDIENCE MEMBER: ...I'm very concerned about the morality of our country now. TV, movies, the music that our children are, you know, barraged with every day. And I want to know if there's anything that can be worked out with the—Hollywood, or whoever, to help get rid of some of this bad language and whatever, you know...
BUSH: ...We can have filters on Internets where public money is spent. There ought to be filters in public libraries and filters in public schools so if kids get on the Internet, there is not going to be pornography or violence coming in.

In the 2004 election's second debate in St. Louis, Missouri, Bush used the word "Internets" in response to an audience question about a potential military draft:^[2]

DANIEL FARLEY, AUDIENCE MEMBER: 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, uh, Internets,¹ 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.

Note 1: The official transcript follows the word "Internets" with "(sic)".

[edit] Internet and media reaction

Ridicule, and later parody, of Bush's apparent gaffe spread quickly on the Internet and in traditional media following the 2004 debate. Minutes after Bush made the remark, posters to online forums remarked that the term was "Another Bushism!"^[3], wondered "is this where I find those 'internets' the President mentioned?",^[4] and hypothesized "Something tells me our president does not spend a lot of time online."^[5] The following evening, on October 9, 2004, Saturday Night Live parodied the debate,^[6] with Will Forte's George W. Bush saying,

I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft. I don't know how many of these Internets are carrying these rumors, but they're just wrong. I think the problem here may be more of a question of getting rid of the bad Internets and keeping the good Internets. You know, 'cause I think we can all agree... there're just too many Internets.^[7]

The SNL parody was replayed the following morning (Sunday October 10, 2004) on CNN's Inside Politics Sunday.^[8] Numerous homages and parodies, most including an audio or video clip from the second 2004 debate, appeared on other humor and entertainment web sites, including YTMND,^[9]^[10] and spread virally on the Internet.

[edit] Older use of “internets”

The singular "Internet" (usually capitalized, but see Internet for discussion) results from the connection of many smaller networks. In the early years of internetworking, an "internet" (uncapitalized) represented the connection of any two separate networks, and this word can be properly pluralized. This usage has not been common since the 1980s; today, systems of internetworked computers apart from (or as a subset of) the larger Internet are referred to as intranets. The term "intranet" is also used to refer to collections of Internet-technology applications (i.e. private web pages, portals) that are not visible on the public Internet.