As people above have said, I would use “alright” to mean “fine”, and “all right” to mean “each one is correct”.
On the other hand, people who write “back yard” as one word should be taken out and shot. “Back” is an adjective, describing the yard and distinguishing it from the front yard. “Backyard” just looks like a typo for “backward”.
And yet, regardless of whatever a forum poll says, alright exists and is used by millions of english speakers on a regular basis. The only thing this poll proves is that dopers are old-fashioned. That’s not news.
if i said it ain’t correct you might think that wrong, irregardless.
Zxbcmpd exists now, too. It means not alright. If people don’t use it, they’re old fashioned.
So, am I the only one who read Frindle growing up or what?
When you have millions of people using “zxbcmpd”, you’ll have a point. Until then, not so much.
By itself, the number of people using zxbcmpd — or believing anything — has nothing to do with right or wrong.
Millions believed the world is flat.
The meaning of words is arbitrary. There is no innate concept of dogginess that is captured in the word dog. There is no inherent attribute of quickly that makes it a good word for describing something occurring in a fast manner as opposed to the color of the sky after a thunderstorm. And there’s no particular reason why all right can only be spelled all right. It’s up to the speakers and many choose to use alright which means it’s a perfectly acceptable spelling.
This is very different from the world being round as that is not arbitrary.
And dataguy’s post is quoted in agreement once again. “Alright” is never used to mean “all correct”. It’s a synonym for “okay” and apparently the world believes there is a need for it. It’s a useful word and the distinctive spelling fights ambiguity.
Tradition can be good. It promotes standards that can reduce confusion. But when tradition pointlessly increases ambiguity, then it’s bad.
I have long been resigned to “alright” becoming standard English usage eventually. It’s most of the way there and there is no way to stop it. But I don’t like it one bit. It looks gratingly wrong to me. It falls short of literacy. It expresses nothing that the standard all right doesn’t express better, so it’s useless on top of being dumb.
Both of them are fine.
I mostly just use alright now. Doesn’t even ping the spellchecker.
If we can have almost; wherewithal; whomever; however; onto; into; whatever; furthermore; etc. I don’t see why not. Besides, it looks alright.
And to make the pedants scream in agony, I don’t mind if a lot becomes alot,* but I’d feel dumb spelling it “alot” way more than alright.
*Yes, I know the Hyperbole and a Half comic.
Gaaaa. It’s like calling cyan blue.
You take that back! TAKE IT BACK!
But everyone knows what I mean when I say blue for cyan. I mean, like, everyone knows what I mean when I say blue when it comes to cyan.
English evolves. Word doesn’t even bother with a squiggly line under blue. Cyan is blue, and that’s correct.
All right. I take it back.
Magenta is red.
Good points. I can see the logic. But whatever color you call cyan, its complimentary color (its opposite) on the color wheel must also be renamed (assuming you aren’t just going to rename colors arbitrarily). So if you call it “blue,” then you’ll have to call red “yellow,” in keeping with the same internal logic of the applied language.
No matter how you define it, color has objective, physical properties that are all symmetrical and unchangeable (despite the fact that labels applied to color, and any primary color model used to create a color gamut, is mostly arbitrary).
Language is fluid, arbitrary (yet highly organized) and ever evolving, But… There are no objective physical properties. If it weren’t so, the English we speak now would’ve remained the same, not allowing for new words, portmanteaus or shifting colloquial dialects. It follows no physical, external law.
Calling cyan “blue” is semantics, only (which sort of proves my point).
That said, I wasn’t planning on sounding this serious. Color theory just makes me nerd out of control, I guess.
That’s true, but it only gets you so far. Nothing is acceptable or unacceptable but that it’s acceptable or unacceptable to someone. Even if the majority of English speakers consider “alright” acceptable, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea in formal writing. Not that formal writing is more “correct” than informal writing, but there is room to say that a particular usage is incorrect or unacceptable in formal writing even if it is widely used and accepted in less formal contexts. If someone told me that “ain’t” is incorrect I wouldn’t say that they are wrong because millions of people use it, I would instead say that they are overgeneralizing from a small subset of contexts in which “ain’t” is widely considered incorrect.
Who said anything about formal writing? When I talk about formal writing, I’ll start with “In formal writing…” Formal writing has loads of restrictions that no one cares about on a regular basis. In a forum like facebook or this messageboard where the only retribution is peer pressure, I see no reason to coerce others to my arbitrary standard, when meaning is not occluded by allowing such freedom. And frankly if alright is what upsets someone, they deserve to be upsetted as often as possible.
And I would go so far as to say, in dialects where ain’t is widely used, avoiding it is the incorrect behavior.
No one’s forcing anyone to do anything, as if anyone could. The OP asked a question.
Hmmm. Message-board peer pressure. 