That’s not all right

Not everything in this paragraph from Yahoo! TV’s “Primetime in No Time” is all wrong — just a few things. Like “especially between Kenya Moore went after…” What’s with that? And why does the writer forget to include the in “tumbled to (the) ground” and “stormed off (the) set”? But the bigger issue is the use of alright, which is considered nonstandard. Are you all right with that spelling?

Here’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

Despite the frequent use of the form alright the single word spelling is still widely viewed as nonstandard. In our 2009 survey, more than two-thirds of the Usage Panel rejected alright in examples like Don’t worry. Everything will be alright, whereas over 90 percent accepted all right in the same examples. This resistance may seem peculiar, since similar fusions incorporating all, such as already and altogether, have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling. Readers may view the use of alright, especially in formal writing, as an error or a willful breaking of convention.

Have you pleaded guilty yet?

Has the Yahoo! Sports writer responsible for this gaffe pleaded guilty in criminal court, because this attempt at spelling the past tense of plead is an assault on the English language?

The writer should be thrown in the grammar slammer for impersonating a professional. Anyone who has gone through the third grade in an English-speaking knows that the past tense is pleaded or pled.

Perhaps the writer has confused this word with the word read (pronounced reed); its past tense is also spelled read, but pronounced red. And then the writer passed the confusion on to the reader.