All right and alright

Factual Questions
41

I’d been mulling over this thread trying to figure out what it was in my first post that could’ve really rankled anyone, and also where Polycarp could have gotten the idea that those who disagree with him don’t believe there are any usage rules at all. And then I realized the clear answer to the first question, and probably a contributing factor to Polycarp’s confusion:

So, to clarify… I meant “What’s interesting is your assumption that there are rules [that govern the use of ‘all right’ vs. ‘alright’]”. I was never questioning the existence of language rules in general. I’m sorry if I caused any misinterpretation with that original post. In my subsequent posts in this thread, I have tried to make it clear that I do believe there are language rules, and precisely how that is compatible with (and even demanded by) a proper descriptivism. Please, you need not expend your efforts arguing against the bugaboo of the linguistic anarchist. He hasn’t shown up here, nor, indeed, so far as I’ve been able to experience, ever anywhere else. He doesn’t exist in any but the Noam Chomsky sense of the term, he’s just a scary story prescriptivists tell their children at night to get them to keep their "less"es and "fewer"s distinct.
(I must note, though, that “Khoi polloi” was a thing of beauty.)

42

Regardless of how it’s spelled, Ronnie Eckstine taught us that the expression should be pronounced aw-RAT, as in:

Feelin’ aw-RAT,
Not feelin’ too good mahsef…

43

Don’t want to invoke or inflame any prescriptivist/descriptivist arguments, but it would appear that alright is in fact alright in British English, or is at the very least, more acceptable in that form than it is in American English.

http://www.longman.com/ae/azar/grammar_ex/message_board/archive/articles/00363.html

44

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t quite go along with that.

45

Which version? (also, what does it actually say?)

46

The book version in front of me only says, adv. disp. = all right. I’m afraid it’s rather worn, and I can’t tell which version it is, but that means to go to the entry for “all right” if you want to know anything about it.

But entering “alright” in the OneLook Dictionary brings up entries in several dictionaries, but not the Oxford. And when you do go to the entries that ARE there, it seems always to be listed as non-standard.

47

Interesting… I felt sure the OED was going to support me at least a little, but I’m back at home now and my hard copy (seventh edition - 1982) says Alright (erron.) = all right.
Hmmph.

Thing is, I’m almost certain that I was taught Alright was preferrable to All right, and my English teacher was quite a stickler for that sort of thing (aren’t they all?). Also, there’s a distinct semantic different between the two forms, consider:

I have marked your spelling test and your answers are alright
I have marked your spelling test and your answers are all right.

  • OK, if we were actually to mean ‘all correct’, we should say ‘all correct’ - answers are correct, people are right, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have to strain much harder to find an example that would be truly ambiguous if written in (what is being argued to be) the correct form.
48

Where did you pick up this idea? I can’t find any references to it on the Internet (not in a quick Google, anyway).

49

I retired from teaching in 1989. Excalibre, I do remember challenging you about a year or so ago. It wasn’t your claim of some knowledge of linguistics that I challenged. You left out the important word. What I challenged was your claim to expertise. I don’t claim any expertise mayself, but I don’t mind sharing what training I have had that seems to be relevant to you.

I had a year of linguistics at Peabody/Vanderbilt. These were upper level courses. The professor required us to submit our papers following the rules of standard academic grammar according to Harbrace. Five violations of Harbrace was an automatic F. By its very nature, the linguistics itself was descriptive, but not the means used to discuss the language.

As I’ve told you before, I also studied grammar on a college level and still have my textbook within reach.

I have a Bachelor of Arts Degree from Vanderbilt with a major in English and a major in Speech and Drama.

You missed one of the points of my post. Change in language is natural – the wheel turns. I have no objection to the change in language at all. It’s not a moral issue.

There are reasons for English teachers to hold down their end of it so that it doesn’t go careening off into space overnight. If you think that can’t happen, remember that people do have to ask what certain groups of letters stand for here. I spent two months wondering why people wanted to add “You Make Me Vomit” to their posts.

Personally, I don’t think that knowing “academic grammar” at SDMB sets many people apart here.

Since this is General Questions and not the Pit, and since the exchange between us happened a long time ago and since you have some of your facts about me wrong, why stir up the irrelevant?

Zeldar had a good question which I cannot answer for you.

50

I may have inferred it backwards from being told it was wrong to say "you are correct’. AFAIK, it should be “You are right” or "Your answer is correct’.

51

Hmm… I stress the “al” and “read” equally in already, as well as the “al” and “ge” in altogether.

Just a data point.

-FrL-

52

“Alright” is all right, alright?

-FrL-

53

In your opinion, what does that net benefit consist in?

-FrL-

54

If I’m understanding you correctly, you are saying descriptivists accept rules of the first kind in the sense that they affirm that there are such rules governing actual linguistic usage, and you are saying they don’t accept rules of the second kind in exactly the same sense–they do not affirm (indeed they deny) that there are any such rules governing actual linguistic usage.

I take this to be absolutely correct. But I think its a very strange and misleading way to put it. Specifically, this is not the way we usually use the phrase “To accept a rule.”

I imagine (correct me if I’m wrong) that if someone asked your advice about an essay they had written, specifically about how it is written rather than about what it says, you would be likely to offer advice about style. And I also think that style does not constitute an example of a set of rules of the first kind, but rather, rules of the second kind. But if you were to give such advice, wouldn’t it be reasonable to say that you show thereby that you accept rules of the second kind after all? To be sure, this sense of “accept” is different than the one explicated in my first paragraph above. But isn’t this latter sense of the term more in keeping with its usual usage?

Well, did I misinterpret you above? Or do you disagree with me about how “accept a rule” is generally used (or supposed to be used or whatever)? Or is there something else I’ve missed?

-FrL-

55

I’m capable of giving stylistic advice. But, I wouldn’t consider my style judgements to be elevated to the level of rules (If someone writes too tersely or long-windedly or cleverly or smugly or formally or with too much repetition or too many parentheses or ellipses for my tastes… well, that’s just my tastes. I’m not going to pretend they’ve written erroneously, I’m not going to call it a mistake. I’ll tell them what I don’t care for, but it’s on the level of saying “Oh, I don’t like my pizzas this cheesy” or “I like music with a more gradual buildup”. Not a red ink situation. If the author prefers his style as it is, then I could hardly force the issue.). And, my style judgements would have pretty much nothing to do with the sort of lists of rules you’d find in Strunk and White or Fowler. I really, honestly, truly don’t give a damn about almost any of the ridiculous reality-detached gripes you’ll find in compendiums of that sort. (Does anyone really find “taller than me” offensive on aesthetic grounds? To my knowledge, only perhaps as an unnatural and taught distaste.). And even if I did share those particular hang-ups, the fact that those “rules” get broken all the time without anyone noticing would illustrate my aesthetic judgement on the matter to be so far from the mainstream as to make any demands for rigid conformity laughably arrogant.

And before anyone asks, I am also capable of making mechanical judgements. (“You accidentally left out a question mark here, you’ve misspelled this word (see the common usage for the currently accepted spellings), this sentence is missing a subject, this appears to be a typo, I don’t know why you capitalized this, this should probably be in quotes, this word seems repeated for no reason, and finally, the usual term is ‘intents and purposes’ rather than ‘intensive purposes’ (again, see the overwhelming common usage)”, “Oh yeah, good call on all of those. Most of those were just brain-farts on my part. I didn’t know that about the spelling and ‘intents and purposes’, though, but, yeah, checking out what most people say, you turned out to be right.”) I just happen to ground my mechanical judgements in a concrete empirical foundation; they’re scientific, they’re falsifiable. You could hope to defend your usage and prove me wrong, since I’m not just blindly clinging to fairy tales passed down.

If Martian anthropologists were to try to figure out how to speak and write English, what would they do? They’d gather a large sample of recorded speech and text from English speakers, analyze it, and eventually be able to extract all kinds of rules. (And, yes, such an analysis would be sophisticated enough to realize the existence of typos, speech errors, malapropisms, etc.) Those are the rules I accept. Everything else is just superstition.

56

The basis for the original objection is ridiculous in the first place - presumably, pre-concatenation, people put equal stress on the “all” and “together” in “altogether”.

57

Posting a reply moves a bit beyond the OP…

In the few threads in which I’ve participated the pattern is the same. An OP wants to know what is “correct” and the thread rapidly morphs to a discussion of who or what the arbiter should be, and whether or not there is a “correct” anything.

For me, the net benefit of an educated guardianship is that it codifies usage enough to slow evolution. It also serves to standardize usage across a broader range of users, and a larger community of users for the same language facilitates better communication. The power of language–perhaps English in particular–lies in being able to communicate the abstract. A robust language is able to communicate ideas and nuances that are very complex.

Absent a guardianship of some type, variations which occur as a natural extension of the human ability to use language tend to apply in narrower and narrower circles. In my family, for instance, we might use slang or constructions which are unique only to our tiny linguistic microcosm. We know what we mean; the next person may not.

I’m not personally satisfied with a guardianship model which derives its only authority from a description of what the masses are doing. To borrow a delightful expression from one of my philosophy professors, that would be “a pooling of ignorance.”

On average, the polloi are more flexible and more creative. What they bring to the table is linguistic drift, and only linguistic drift expands a language’s capacity to communicate. Without a structural framework inside of which to expand, however, linguistic fluidity will lead to miscommunication as a price to pay for richness of expression. I credit the educated guardians with creating and maintaining that structural framework.

I am neither a grammarian nor a linguist, nor an expert of any kind. All I bring to the table is a love of this language and a hobby of observing humans. I have done my share of mocking English teachers and poking fun at pedants–my Username and my use of the term “the polloi” instead of “the hoi polloi” are two obvious examples–but in the end I owe them a debt, even if they occasionally indulged themselves in marking my own usage as incorrect.

While it may be true that any usage is alright as long as meaning is accurately communicated, all usage is not all right. Hooray for the polloi, stumbling their way into new expressiveness, but god bless the pedants for marking the trail so that we can all use it to say what we mean and mean what we say.

58

Okay, okay! The correct spelling is “all-rite”.

It’s all right here, and it looks alright to me:
All-Rite, The RV Repair Parts Specialist
All-Rite Spring Company
All-Rite Industries

Obviously, the ultimate authority is Google, and 121,000 hits can’t be all wrong.

But, I could be … :wink:

59

You know, on further thought I see that the point Indistinguishable was making about the two sets of rules is quite valid, especially as many of the second set are not proclaimed by those deferred to as arbiters (Fowler, Strunk and White, etc.), but only by the hyperpedantic.

To split an infinitive unnecessarily is generally a stylistic booboo, but I’m quite willing to boldly split an infinitive when it sounds right stylistically. The sentence-ending preposition rule is one that makes for greater clarity in written prose (and IMO a more euphonious style) when adhered to much of the time, but to prescribe it as a violation of English prose is, in Churchill’s words, an impertinence up with which we should not put.

Punctuation rules are, in my experience, much more often of the first kind – simple points intended to improve clarity in written prose – than of the second kind. A comma splice offends, not because there’s anything inherently more appropriate in a semicolon than a comma in joining two independent clauses without a conjunction, but because the comma triggers an expectation that what follows is a grammatical continuation (and presumably a conceptual continuation) of what was addressed in the clause before it. A semicolon in that place is a small one-character signal that a change of concept and sentence structure is due to follow. Italicizing or underscoring unassimilated foreign phrases and standalone titles: it’s much the same sort of usage; the petty stylistic point alerts the reader that something other than the writer’s own English expository prose is present.

I have forgotten who originally said it, but it’s a concept that has stuck with me: Good writing is seduction and intercourse, the writer taking the pains needed to pleasure his or her readers. Poor writing is masturbation, in which the writer’s sole goal is to relieve him/herself of the pent-up pressure within him/her, and has no thought for anyone else.

60

I’m not sure I buy that you think your advise would just reflect your personal taste. Say the advisee has written a research paper to turn in as his final project for a course in English Literature. In the middle of it, you find the sentence “But that ain’t the right interpretation.” Elsewhere you see “There’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t talked about yet.” I imagine you would advise him to leave out “ain’t,” and you would caution him against “a bunch of stuff.” But would you really be advising him against these usages because they are “not to your taste?” I doubt it–I think you would advise him against these usages because you know they are inappropriate* for the kind of paper the paper is supposed to be. This is not a judgment of taste–it is an attempt at a judgment of an objective fact. (I.e., the objective* fact that certain usages are appropriate in certain contexts.)

What kind of rule is “Usage X is appropriate in context Y?”

-FrL-

*I imagine (again with the imagining) that you want to object that you don’t know such usages are inappropriate, that rather, you simply know that they are generally considered inappropriate by those to whom papers like this are turned in. But I suggest that their being considered inappropriate by these people is what constitutes them as actually objectively inappropriate. “Objectively?!” Yes, objectively, in the same sense that it is an objective fact that the piece of paper I’ve got in my pocket right now is money. What constitutes it as money is nothing about the paper itself, but rather, facts about various people’s attitudes toward it. Similarly, what makes a usage inappropriate is nothing about the usage itself, but rather, various people’s attitudes toward it. One day, the piece of paper in my pocket may no longer count as money. It is still an objective fact that it is money right now. Similarly, one day, the usages in question may cease to be inappropriate. But it is still a fact that they are inappropriate right now.