I’m sorry, but I’m with the OP. “Alright” is an abomination. Even typing it in order to shun it pains me.
“Want to go shoot pool?”
“All right.”
Looks perfect.
The rest of you is teh freak, dawgs.
For once one of these threads that I can actually agree with. Spelling ain’t like grammar; grammar is different from person to person, but spelling is something that it’s easiest to just agree upon.
Anyone know where the variant spelling ‘alright’ came from, by the way? I’ve always wondered about that, since I think I might have used it before I first ran into a condemnation of it.
EddyTeddyFreddy -
May I do the pleasure of introducing you to pizzabrat?
Well, I don’t know. I’m pretty pedantic about grammar and spelling details in general, but I really don’t have a problem with it. It’s a contraction; they happen, and this one’s been around for some time. As Bartleby points out, it’s hardly more offensive than “altogether” or “already”, yet these are happily accepted, and have developed independent meanings much as I believe “alright” is doing. It’s not a formulation I’d use in formal writing (more as a question of style than one of spelling*), but when reporting speech it seems quite natural to me.
- I’d never write a line like, “This method was tested, and found to be alright/all right,” for example, but only because either spelling sounds stupidly informal. I’d prefer a word like “acceptable” or some such.
HAW HAW, neuroman, :D, thanks for the links!!! That “Dawg” thread is a classic. It should be made a Sticky.
If that’s your pleasure, what’s your pain?
EddyTeddyFreddy:
Please enlighten us about hyphenation rules. I know that the following sentence is wrong:
“Please pick-up your paychecks at the front desk.”
It should be:
“Please pick up your paychecks at the front desk.”
I believe this is how to correctly use this word as hyphenated:
“Pick-up hours are between 5:00 and 6:00 p.m.”
Can you provide a succinctly worded grammar rule which I can quote when I try to explain this difference to my bosses?
The ‘net is probably a bad place to employ said mission, IMHO. 
May whatever god you may believe in spare you from the horror of leetspeak :eek: , which even the Master agrees gives one a friggin’ headache! BTW, ETF, as a point of curiosity, how does a proofreader reconcile British vs. American/Standard English; i.e. parlor: parlour? An English professor of mine once docked me points on an essay for using “British” spelling, and I replied “didn’t they evolve the language that we now use”? Sadly, it didn’t help. He said it was unacceptable. The prig. He stole points from my essay!
Eddy, I think you’ve lost the battle with “alright”. Fowler was bitching about it in Modern English Usage in the twenties, and the OED shows uses of it from the late 19th century. The boat may have sailed.
Pugluvr, “pick up” is a verb and an adverb put together. You perform an action - the action is picking. The “up” provides additional information about how this action is performed. You pick the object up.
An easy way to tell which is which is that you could put this adverb after the object, and it would still make sense to most people. Therefore “I pick up the pencil” can convert into “I pick the pencil up”, or in your example, “Please pick up your paychecks” could be rendered “Please pick your paychecks up”.
The hyphenated form “pick-up” is a noun and can’t be split up without losing its meaning. If you can replace it with “collection” and the phrase still means what you want it to mean, it should be “pick-up”. For that matter, just replace “pick-up” with collection in all cases - far more elegant.
Uh, ETF…isn’t this a rather hidebound, inflexible…uh…Republican kind of way you’re acting?
Now, there you go again, trying to hijack Truth, Justice, and the Meritorious Way entirely to the Right. We leftward liberal types can be just as passionate in the defense of Mom-Puppies-Apple-Pie-Good[sup]tm[/sup]; the difference is, we stop to think about it first.
Fortunately for me, I don’t have to. I proofread transcripts of pretrial depositions and regulatory hearings, so my focus is on ensuring correct American spellings, interpreting and fixing oddball results of misstrokes by the court reporter, checking spellings of proper names, technical terms, and so forth, adjusting punctuation, and generally walking the tightrope of making intelligible to the reader the verbatim transcriptions of testimony by witnesses whose language skills range from superbly erudite to barely comprehensible.
Unfortunately alright is acceptable. I hate it. Mr P prefers it but I’ve yet to see an editor change it on him. Irregardless is moving closer to acceptable too, sadly.
The US/UK/Australian English issue is simple. Depending on where the article or book is to be published and depending on house style, you use the appropriate style manual or dictionary.
The ancient (© 1979) Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary at my desk lists ‘alright’ as a word (with no ‘disputed’ status) synonymous with ‘all right.’ It cites Gertrude Stein in its usage example.
Stein wasn’t the most conventional user of the English language, but the point is, ‘alright’ didn’t sneak into the language yesterday, or even within the past generation.
It’s a contraction of ‘all right’. Language evolves. You surely wouldn’t eschew “wouldn’t” simply because it means the same as “would not.”
You people are fighting a loosing battle.
But it’s all right, now,
In fact, it’s a gas.