My latest article for The Week is on the spelling alright: why so many people hate it – and why you should ignore them:
It’s all right to spell it ‘alright’
My latest article for The Week is on the spelling alright: why so many people hate it – and why you should ignore them:
This is the text of a presentation I made to the Toronto branch of the Editors’ Association of Canada, Sept. 24, 2007. Certain parts were sung; you can guess which.
It ain’t necessarily so, no,
it ain’t necessarily so,
the things Strunk and White
want to tell you are right,
it just ain’t necessarily so.
Getting pissed off about grammatical errors is a favourite activity of a surprisingly large portion of English speakers. Continue reading
Posted in editing, language and linguistics
Tagged a historic, ain't, alright, an historic, anyways, can, capitalization, conjunctions, decimate, descriptivism, double negatives, double superlatives, fewer, fun, hopefully, language change, lay, less, lie, like, may, more unique, prepositions, prescriptivism, sentence adverbs, sociolinguistics, split infinitives, standard English, till, verbing