I’m Alright, Jack
Alright, it’s time for some more fun with words. Specifically, that one—alright, a word that sets some people’s teeth on edge. Which is why I don’t use it much any more: I use all right for the same reason I avoid split infinitives in formal writing—because alright and split infinitives annoy some people, not because they annoy me.
“Alright,” he insisted, “let’s start.
Now, those who despise it, take heart:
We’re taking this word,
Alright, as you’ve heard,
And tearing it all right apart.”
Hanging out on a website for word-lovers, you inevitably run into people who loathe alright, and I ran into one such today. I won’t name her, because she’s uncannily close to me in most of her attitudes towards usage and grammar, which makes her a fine and upstanding human being. (Also, she uses a pseudonym and I don’t know her real name.) But it was because we agree on so much that I felt free to give her alrightophobia a tweak:
OED has an 1893 listing for alright, which makes the word older than just about everyone who’s ever lived. Time to let go, sez I. There are plenty of times when we don’t want to say that things are all right or all right, but just alright, already. Even if we aren’t all ready.
Undeniable logic, you might say, or at least a nifty bit of wordplay, and if you did I would think you were alright. But my colleague pointed to a passionate condemnation on another page, where she’d said that the essence of her loathing was that
alright = all + right
already ≠ all + ready
In other words, alright does nothing that all right doesn’t.
I responded:
Y’see, I’d say
already ≠ all + ready
alright ≠ all + right
alright = adequate, as in “It was alright—nothing special.” Substitute all right and that doesn’t make sense. If it was all right—all of it, and as right as could be—why isn’t it special?
alright = yes, as in “We’re done now, alright?” Making a direct equivalent of everything correct stand in for yes is a stretch, but alright is something different.
Essentially:
alright = okay
in its many forms. It’s a British version of that most American of words. So it’s alright by me.
She then took the perfectly reasonable position that this was her pet loathing and she was sticking with it. But I couldn’t resist one last observation—and once I’d made it, couldn’t resist repackaging it here rather than letting it languish in an OEDILF workshop:
The thing I find amusing about the all right vs alright debate is that the obstinate defence of all right by a century of language mavens has given it a stuffy, persnickety air completely at odds with the spirit of the phrase, its laid-back okay-ness. Saying that alright is unacceptably casual is effectively saying it’s more casual than all right, and thus more suitable for describing the casual attitude inherent in the term. The more people fight alright, the more its victory is assured. The irony is delicious.
She had to laugh, even if she still didn’t think it was all right.