The Alright All Right Dilemma

[hells_half_acre]

I have a problem with the words "all right" or the word "alright" depending on the day.

My problem is that it causes one of those...conflict thingies in my head.

1. I believe in the evolution of language. I believe that "alright" should be a word and that is how it should be spelled. I think it reflects how people SAY "all right" - as one word, not two. 
2. I really really hate it when I spell things wrong or have gross grammatical errors.

So, I never know when I'm writing whether I should write "alright" even though I know that it's blatantly wrong, because I want to encourage it to be officially accepted as the standard spelling - or if I should be writing "all right" because that is the proper thing to do, and I have a Masters, damn it!

The only way I have solved this so far is to avoid the words "all right/alright" like the plague and use "okay" instead or some other word. Of course, for those who read my Demented'verse, you'll probably have noticed that I use "alright" all the time in it - a fact that actually makes my fingers itch when I read it. That being said, when I read "all right" in other people's fics, I don't like it, I want them to use "alright."

Anyway, I don't know what to do about this problem....and somehow I doubt this keeps other people up at night.

Comments

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

I feel odd reading "all right" in a sentence as my brain interprets them differently I realize there would be a comma somewhere if this were the case but I feel like a sentence such as "They were all right" could mean that all of them were correct versus "They were alright" which meant they were okay.

Yes, exactly!! Oh man...see, we just need dictionaries to catch up with the way we're using the language. If a dictionary would just put this in their frickin' book like they do with some of the other stupid stuff we come up with...for chrissakes "tweeps" was added to Oxford in 2012.

like YOLO or LOL I felt disgusting just typing that

Haha, I like you.

Also Microsoft Word never corrects me so I feel no guilt over this. (I do feel irritated when it corrects me on the spelling of colour).

True, maybe I should just declare MS word as the authority and just use "alright" and not obsess over it anymore...

I set my spell-checker to "Canadian English" which means that it doesn't get offended at my use of "colour" or "favour" or "neighbour"...though, I'm ashamed to admit that it DID force me to use Zs instead of Ss in words like "realize" and "civilize", because apparently Ss used that way are British English, not Canadian.

[akatsukichii.livejournal.com]

It's fine to obsess over things although it will probably annoy you every time you set to write something even if you tell yourself that you shouldn't be worried...

I set my settings to Canadian English all the time it just seems to dislike me and revert. Canadian English is weird though many people are confused as to what is the correct form of a word seeing as we're using British English (well part of it) and bordering USA a but of crossover is bound to happen.

Well it was fun discussing grammar with you so I shall proceed to add you as a friend (there's really almost no point in adding me back because I only use this account to comment).

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree about Canadian English. I once got a mark off on an English assignment in High School for spelling "traveled" incorrectly, until I brought in an Oxford dictionary and showed the teacher that my version was also an acceptable spelling. :P (I think I was reading a bunch of British books at the time.)

Yay! Friend! I don't often discuss grammar, but hopefully you don't regret the decision. ;) I also very rarely flock posts, so, I think we're good to go.