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.

She’s doing all right!

Look out, readers! Yahoo! Shine is coming and it has some new and creative abuses of the language. First up? It’s an arbitrary use of the Shift key:

Then, it’s on to a missing word, an undercapitalized Sea, and best of all, Ursula Andress at 76:

She looks pretty good for her age — heck, for any age!

Of course, the writer’s mistake, never before seen by my Terribly Write eyes, is that the writer thought that she should include the actress’s age today with a description of her decades ago. It’s a mistake she’ll make throughout the article. But, on to her next creative capitalization error: This time it’s neglecting to capitalize Secret Service. That’s closely followed by too many hyphens in what should be drive-by shooting:

And it’s another word gone missing!

And it’s a misspelled Jane Seymour followed by her misspelled character, Solitaire, and another arbitrarily capitalized word:

Her name is still Seymour:

Here’s one of my faves: Using a hyphen (which is a short horizontal line like this: -) instead of an em dash (which is much longer, like this: — ). But other than that, this senior editor is doing all right!

Is alright all right or all wrong?

All right, let’s just get down to it: The Yahoo! News editors don’t know that alright is all wrong:

Not in the write mood

Sometimes writers just aren’t in the mood to write. Maybe they call it writer’s block. Or maybe they recognize that they’re not invested in the topic. Whatever the reason, the result usually suffers. Perhaps Piper Weiss, the Yahoo! Shine writer responsible for mangling Matthew McConaughey, wasn’t in the mood to check the spelling of his name:

Perchance she thought an editor would supply the missing quotation marks around the movie titles and the missing caps on mom:

And maybe she relied on an editor to remove the incorrect apostrophe and single quotation marks:

If she is the kind of writer who lets boredom affect her pearls, she might skip a word here:

Or turn a verb into some sort of possessive or contraction with an apostrophe:

To compensate, she might capitalize cancer (thinking it’s the Big C, after all). If she’s bored with proofreading, she’d overlook a missing word:

Misspelling director Nancy Meyers’ name is bad, but crediting the writing to someone named Darlene Sloan, when it was Darlene Hunt who created the show, is unforgivable. Unless you’re really uninterested in the topic. Then, mistakes happen:

Her mind might have been on Olympia Snowe or Stephen King when she was thinking about a Maine character. Her concentration perhaps wavered when trying to tap out Gabourey Sidibe. She may have been attempting a pun with white-bred. Unfortunately, in an error-filled article, an attempt at a pun could strike the reader as just another goof. The funky punctuation around size is interesting; quotation marks can be soooo boring:

All right. I just gotta say it: Don’t use alright. Most authorities consider it wrong, except in the most casual of writing:

Minor picky point: If the writer is awake, I’d recommend moving the comma inside the quotation marks, where it belongs:

Clearly the writer is bored. Or uninterested and stuff. If only she were as interested in writing well as she is in writing a lot.

If she were, she’d know that the sentence she wrote must be in the subjective subjunctive mood. Maybe she’s just not in the mood to write or be right.

Nothing says “I don’t give a crap” like “Nothing says…”

Nothing says “I don’t give a crap about writing” like starting a sentence with “Nothing says” and including an extra word or two:

Not once, but twice:

The  failure to match a singular subject (like way) with a singular verb (which should be is) is another indicator of a writer’s indifference:

Maybe if the writing were impeccable, the use of alright could be an acceptable use of nonstandard language:

But, when the writing contains so many sloppy errors and it appears on Yahoo! Shine, the reader assumes that the writer is unaware that correct expression is all right.

Hear, hear. Not here

Aw-righty, let’s take a look at this sentence from Yahoo! Shine:

Do you object to the use of alright, which is considered “nonstandard”? The excruciatingly correct expression is all right, but in informal writing such as a blog, alright is probably all right. Of course, the writer who uses nonstandard English runs the risk of being considered rebellious or illiterate by some grammar conservatives.

There’s no question that the redundant a a is incorrect and that the word here here should be hear: