“Alright” is TTBOMK unacceptable in formal English. It’s other usages where the al- prefix can be interchangeable with the word “all” that have become acceptable. For example, “The 20 kids from the subdivision walked the two blocks to school, all together” (i.e., in a group) vs. “The words ‘alot’ and ‘alright’ are altogether (=completely) unacceptable.” 
I’m wondering about the OP remembering the word “nachos”.
As they were first produced commercially in 1976 in Texas, I wonder if they were known up in Canada in the “mid 80’s”?
Good point. There are other words, though, like “heap”, which would have involved (IMHO) just as short a jump.
Agreed. I’m sure I’ve seen “alright” used in a few VERY INFORMAL (as I said) situations, without its crying out (at least to me) to be corrected – whereas “alot” just looks wrong, in any situation, no matter how informal.
What do people mean by WAG? Its used alot hereabouts. #18 First meaning I found was Wives And Girlfriends; the Initial Wiki has 127 meanings, none seem to match Dopers’ use.
Wild Ass Guess
WAG = wild-assed guess. There’s also SWAG, which is a scientific wild-assed guess.
Next, you’ll be asking about Gaudere’s Law.
There’s also “already”.
A bit more useful than a WAG is an FBI (Feral Burro Insight). 
I went to elementary school in Columbus, Ind., and in Towson, Md., in the 1960s, and junior high and high school in Towson through 1975. We were consistently taught to use “a lot” and that “alot” is nonstandard usage and strongly discouraged from using it–that is, it was marked as an error in any work, at least for English class.
Nonsense. “Alright”, in its modern sense, is attested in the OED as far back as 1893, and in a closely related sense it goes back to Old English. OneLook Dictionary finds over 40 entries for it in various online dictionaries.
By contrast, as I have already pointed out, “alot” does not appear in the OED at all, and the only relevant entries found by OneLook Dictionary are the Wicktionary entry I already cited, and Urban Dictionary, which defines it as ‘The retarded way to spell “a lot”.’
The cases are quite different. “Alright” is a well established English word. “Alot” is an error.
Either your memory is playing tricks on you, or your teacher was an idiot.
Oh please. All languages are defined by usage, French as well as English as well as any other one. And many languages have regulatory bodies, but (unlike what you’re suggesting) the work they do is largely descriptive: figure out what users of the language say and write, and establish a standard dialect from that.
Well, “alot” is actually two words, just written together (like cannot). In the same way, when you say, “I have a bunch of nachos,” if you really want to, you can write it in this way: I have abunch of nachos. And you can call it “one word” if you like, but semantically it isn’t.
My interpretation is that this happens because expressions such as much and a lot can effectively take on both substantive and adverbial functions:
I go to a lot of movies.
I go to movies a lot. (i.e, frequently)
Do you eat much for dinner?
Do you eat out much?
Adverbials are not normally compounding semantic units. But because substantives are-- data base, becomes database, for example–two semantic units become one–when people write “a lot”–even as an adveribal–they want to process it as a substantive and write it as one word.
Back in the day I had an English professor who declared that usage of the word “alot” would make the paper an automatic fail. A stoner friend of mine in the class was handed back his paper when the professor noticed the forbidden word in his assignment and was given the choice of correcting the paper and handing it in the next day for reduced credit or taking an automatic “F” for the assignment. He retyped it and handed it in the next day having replaced each occurance of “alot” with “lotsa” - which since he was already failing the class he thought was a really funny thing to do.
The stoner, BTW, later found Jesus and is now an ordained methodist minister who I see from time to time.
Language is defined by usage.
If “alot” is used frequently, then it’s a correct usage.
This is indisputably correct. “Alot” is an English word in a way that “fpongkan” is not. However, in questions of “correctness,” what is actually being asked is, “Is this form, proper in colloquial speech and texting, appropriate usage in a formal written context?” It’s not a question of prescriptivist moral standards, but of appropriateness in a given usage register.
To give an example where the issue is not the appropriateness of a word, consider that most style guides urge eschewing the passive voice, using it only rarely and where the focus is on the recipient of the action. But in preparing a scientific monograph, or even a narrative description of an experiment, the proper usage is always passive. “Three partical specimens of Diprotodon maximus were extracted from the Woolabangong formation (Pliocene)…” or “Two moles of cobalt acetate were titrated into the solution…” The focus in such papers is intentionally removed from the actor and placed on the thing discovered or tested. The register shift changes the stylistic “rule.”
Likewise, “alot” is good colloquial English – and frowned on in formal written usage, for now at least. It may become standard, as “catalog” without the -ue has, it may remain substandard/colloquial in register, or it may become outdated, as “Twenty-three skidoo” has – eighty years ago it was a breezy slang “farewell” usage; today if it means anything beyond outdated slang, it’s “almost two dozen snowmobiles.” Time wsill tell.
Well, how would you frown upon it in speech? This is simply a question of writing conventions. It has nothing to do with prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. For all semantic purposes it’s two words, whether you choose to write it as one or not. Just like cannot.
Polycarp makes an excellent point. I still can’t believe “smell ya later” replaced “goodbye.”
But that’s a little different isn’t? I thought “catalog” originated in a prescriptivist spelling reform movement, like “center” and “color.”