1 Loren: Ophelia, I have to fly back to the US tomorrow. How am I going to break the news to Shakespeare?
2 Ophelia: Just... straight to the point. I'm... sure he'll manage okay.
3 Loren: Oooh, maybe we could have a net.romance.
4 Ophelia: I don't think... Wait. Did you actually say "net-dot-romance"?

How sad is that?

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2016-04-06 Rerun commentary: Mercutio appears to be getting more interested in this conversation over time.

Pronouncing strange linguistic constructs that evolved on the Internet can be fraught with random inconsistency. I remember back in the days when Usenet was the hot new thing. It had bulletin-board-like newsgroups organised hierarchically by descriptive names separated by dots. For example soc.culture was a group in the "soc" (for "society) hierarchy, and about culture.

The problem was you only ever saw this term on a screen, not said by anyone on TV or anything. So you had to figure out for yourself how to pronounce it. I tended to say "sock-dot-culture". But I met someone else who used to say "sosh-culture".