“Every day”, meaning “on all of the days” and “everyday” meaning commonplace or regular, not necessarily every day though, are now so widely misused they are effectively dead as meaningful distinctions.
Even otherwise intelligent people don’t seem to grasp the distinction, even people who would never use the wrong your/you’re or their/there/they’re, or if they did would notice it, and realise they made an error. Anymore/any more is going the same way.
I’ve seen people misuse all ready and already as well.
I’m not sure I agree with the OP. I think “everyday” is an adjective, and “every day” is a modified noun.
I only own one pair of shoes, and I have to wear my everyday shoes every day.
That’s the way it should work. That is not the way I’ve seen it used recently, even for otherwise intelligent people.
I teach at a university, and at least 75 percent of my students mess this up.
They also seem to have considerable trouble telling “a part” apart from “apart.”
For example, “The National Organization for Women was apart of the growing feminist movement of the 1960s.”
You seem to imply that this kind of error is recent, (and possibly an indication of the decline of society), when, in fact, people have always been making errors like this in their writing for as long as people have been learning to write.
People are not born knowing how to write, and no one learns how to write overnight, even in a perfect educational system. Have you seen the complaints of the professors at Yale a hundred years ago? They sounded pretty much as the OP sounds now.
I don’t know how many threads like this have appeared on this board–probably close to a thousand.
And just wait–someone is sure to come along to mention apostrophes, even though it has nothing to do with the topic of the OP.
We’ve certainly had mentions on this Board of the mis-usage of “effect” vs “affect”.
And I’ve previously mentioned my pet peef (singular of peeves), the mis-usage of “stanch” and “staunch”. Yes, even professional journalists who write the news by which we understand the world screw this up.
I agree with the OP.
Alot.
mmm
And those are spelling errors. Just like apostrophes, they don’t have much to do with the issue in the OP.
My point is that whenever any thread comes up about any particular writing error, three things inevitably happen–like clockwork:
It rapidly degenerates into random posts about language usage errors, most of which have nothing to do with the OP.
Someone comes in to mention apostrophes, and wants to let everyone know that they know how to use them correctly.
Someone comes in to make a mindless, simplistic, blanket descriptivist assertion, even though descriptivism (which, as a linguist, I recognize thoroughly), is mostly about speech, not writing.
And a shout out (of profanity) to those who insist on using “noone” rather than “no one”.
Also: “breaks”, what happens when something, like my spirit, gets broken; “brakes”, those things that help stop your car.
ETA: Yeah, I know the above is what guizot is complaining about. Sorry.
Sure, but is it an everyday mistake?
Worse is wary vs. weary.
Yet like speech, writhing conventions change too. Or just plain differ, given the stack of style guides I’ve written to. The Google ngram for the closed form overtook the open form in the 1970s after being vanishingly rare. You were more likely to see “every-day” than “everyday” until just shy of 1900.
What’s remarkable are the OP’s comments about “otherwise intelligent people”, which exposes his or her knowledge of how both language and intelligence work.
Spelling is why otherwise intelligent people pay liberal arts majors coffeeshop wages to copyedit. When the audience is worth the bother.
To be fair, ‘no one’ should be a single word, just like ‘everyone’, ‘anyone’, and ‘someone’.* The only reason it isn’t is because it looks goofy when you take out the space. It’s a poster child for the arbitrary exceptions to rules in the English language.
*See also ‘everybody’, ‘anybody’, ‘somebody’, and :drumroll: ‘nobody’.
What the OP describes is not a very unique phenomenon.
Yeah, it’s only a little unique :).
I think you are agreeing with the OP. I’d just add that “every day” as a phrase functions as an adverb.
And I agree that many, many people mess this up. I see it every day (well, maybe not quite, but it seems like it sometimes) even in ad copy and other professionally produced text. But the difference is not dead to me, because I will always maintain the distinction in my own writing, and I will always cringe at least a little bit when I see other people mix them up.
But I think that there are some people whose brains are wired so that words are, for them, primarily units of spoken language, while others think of words first as units of written language. And it’s the latter kind of people (of whom I am one) who really notice distinctions like this.
We need to make sure that the these language changes are stopped. Never more, I say!
Were there ever any standard conventions about how writhing should be done?
Unfortunately no. Early attempts led to divisions between National Writhing Association and the American Writhing Society. United Writhers attempted a reconciliation in 1952 but they were unsuccessful.