Book reviews, art, gaming, Objectivism and thoughts on other topics as they occur.

May 18, 2006

Now, Here's Something I Can Use

Via Gus Van Horn I learned about this new blog of tidbits on modern English usage. I like to speak and write correctly and I really dislike reading anything that is full of banal errors and corrupted words. (The occasional typo is okay; that happens to everyone sooner or later.)

One of my personal pet peeves is anyone that uses "alright" when they really mean "all right". Unlike "all ready" which has a compressed version: "already" (it's not used identically, mind you), "all right" doesn't compress. So type the other l already.

1 comment:

Jennifer Snow said...

Why not spell it awl rite while you're at it? Perhaps because someone might think you're partaking of some bizarre form of tool-worship?

Personally, I'm in favor of language standardization; it aides communication and is actually an achievable goal with the prevalence of dictionaries and spellcheckers. It's all right to use an old word in a new way, (assuming that it makes some kind of sense) that's slang and usually colorful. It's all right to make a new word when one is needful. It's not all right to take an existing usage and mangle it out of sheer laziness and stupidity.

And I only know two or three people that consistently make mistakes, largely because they haven't bothered to learn how to type properly.