If You’re Not “All Right,” You’re Wrong

Lately, it’s seemed as if Entertainment Weekly has decided that since it couldn’t break celeb news faster than blogs, it would become a place where pop culture was chewed over, which would at least explain all those wretched how-I-grew-up-loving-James Bond-movies/The Big Lebowski/horror-films essays that have been polluting its pages of late.

But if there was one thing you could always count on in Time Inc. publications, it was superior copy-editing. Which is why I’m at a loss upon reading this, in Benjamin Svetkey’s Speed Racer article:

Judging from the advance footage, Speed Racer is a family film alright, but a family film that missed a couple of doses of Ritalin.

Forget the tortured simile. What made me vomit in my mouth a little bit was the spelling “alright.” Goddammit, that’s two words! ALL RIGHT! It’s in the bloody dictionary. Real dictionaries, not the fun little pretendy online ones where you can look up slang terms!

From Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition:

al•right (ôl rit) adj., adv., interj. disputed sp. of ALL RIGHT

That’s right, disputed! As in, the theory of evolution is disputed. BY DUMBASSES!

From Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition:

usage The one-word spelling alright appeared some 75 years after all right itself had reappeared from a 400-year-long absence. Since the early 20th century some critics have insisted alright is wrong, but it has its defenders and its users. It is less frequent than all right but remains in common use especially in journalistic and business publications. It is quite common in fictional dialogue, and is used occasionally in other writing <the first two years of medical school were alright— Gertrude Stein>.

“[I]t has its defenders”: They’re called ILLITERATES! Or British journalists, which is practically the same thing. The battle over this dumb usage has been lost in Blighty; I’ll be damned if I’m gonna cede the colonies without a fight. To quote Free: All right now!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Language, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.