The Friendly Stickler

I’m autistic. But what does that MEAN?

8th August 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

(content warning: including child sexual abuse, bullying, harassment, slavery, and exploitation)

I’m autistic. But that explains everything and nothing about me. I¹ am also thirty-five years old, live in a postage-stamp apartment with my eight-year-old tabby cat, and love cheesy pop music. I have a job I love, a circle of dear friends, and a community that has seen me through the best and worst of my adult life.

I don’t like writing much about myself; I’d rather write about my work and what I’m interested in. I don’t actually crave the spotlight, but I feel I’ve been thrust there just to make myself understood. I am also aware that I may sound like a self-narrating zoo exhibit, though I try to avoid this. I am not Temple Grandin, Daniel Tammet, or Stephen Wiltshire. I am not Social-Justice Rain Man; I am not your fucking inspiration. I am not a computer, and I am most certainly not your computer, not a flesh-and-blood Siri, Cortana, or Alexa. I’m just human. And since I want to just be human, I don’t talk very much about myself. But I’m going to try today anyway.

I hear of concepts that imperfectly describe what I see and feel: hyperlexia, savant syndrome, autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorder. But I could understand what I read as a child unless I was dissociating and couldn’t focus. I don’t have an intellectual disability. And what do you make of someone whose development is delayed in some ways, advanced in others, and utterly normal in still others? The other ones are no improvement: “gifted” smells of the schoolroom or the psychic’s booth, and in any case, I associate it too much with shitty elitist educational policies. “Asperger syndrome” is all wrong; I associate it with “Aspie supremacists” and autistic people who are more abstract than sensory—I’m both. Just “autistic” won’t work, either, because there are different kinds of autism. And “twice-exceptional”? What the hell does that even mean? And I’ve often felt more exceptionable than exceptional, anyway. One of my high-school teachers compared me to Temple Grandin, but I didn’t really make the connection; I thought I was just weird².

I don’t talk much about my internal experiences because my abilities are verbal and symbolic; I’m not a human calculator, musical prodigy, or virtuoso painter³. Because I can filter what I say with words, I understate just about everything. I also worry about being believed, even though I know others with overlapping experiences.

Imagine what it would feel like if the words, numerals, ideas, and other symbols that you hear and read had feelings, shapes, sounds, emotional associations, historical references, textures, personalities, and smells—and you feel them almost as acutely as you do your normal senses. This is ideasthesia, which I have in excess. Ideasthetes process abstractions as concrete sense data. For me, words and symbols call up visual, spatial, emotional, historical, textural, and auditory impressions. Ideasthesia makes me a good writer and designer, but it’s also painful for me to see bad typography, misspelled words, punctuation errors, and poorly matched patterns.
When I read my friends’ words on my computer or phone, it feels as though they’re physically there—I feel their personalities, energy, texture, and emotions. That alone makes it all worth it.
What some see as abstractions—racism, poverty, discrimination—I see as embodied realities. Not only because of my own experiences with marginalisation, which are legion, but also because I actually feel them. Racism is my enslaved ancestors shackled together as they are forcibly repatriated to an alien world. Fingers being sliced off for learning how to read. I think of my sharecropper great-great-grandparents bent over double, picking tobacco in the humid Carolina heat. Demonstrators with calloused feet, sweaty brows, and determined faces holding signs saying, “I AM A MAN.” It’s Blind Tom Wiggins, a kindred spirit from another age, exploited and manipulated and treated as a curiosity. Though his talents were different from mine, there’s a pleasing familiarity in his perceptual acuity—and the plaint of someone who hasn’t been allowed to be a someone. And it’s my being followed around stores, constantly being asked, “Can I help you find anything?” It’s the inexpressible fear of becoming the next George Floyd or Mike Brown if I walk down the wrong street on the wrong day at the wrong time. I don’t want to become a hashtag I’ll never be able to read. When I see Black Lives Matter signs, I start welling up a little. I’m grateful for the acknowledgment that my life does matter, but I’m also angry that it’s taken this long for people to say it.
My verbal thoughts are in complete sentences, using standard syntax, spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Sometimes I can even choose a font for my thoughts. I can also read fluently in my dreams.
Symbols can be heard, tasted, befriended, felt, touched, heard. My ideasthesia is a kind of animism: facts and words and dates and numbers are alive. This is part of why I’m so fanatical about spelling—I’m not upset at the person making a mistake, but I am upset to see an impostor instead of the word I expected. A misspelled word is like a misspelled name. I try to be patient with people, but that’s hard when errors in spelling, punctuation, diction, and usage are saws, lawnmowers, and fireworks going off in your ears. If I’ve ever snapped at you because of an error that set off my internal alarm bells, I’m sorry.
Minute details in people’s speech, writing, and actions weave themselves into larger patterns—my brain seems to have created wetware algorithms. They’re not always perfect, but they’re reliable enough. When I point out the details that helped me identify the pattern, people are incredulous: “Why are you acting this way?” “What’s the matter with you?” “Why do you care so much?” Because those minutiae add up, and if I see certain things constantly going together, I’m going to draw an inference. If you’ve ever sincerely asked why I feel so strongly about things, thank you. Your asking showed that you cared.
I project myself into concepts I want to understand thoroughly. I was never able to understand the idea of derivatives and integrals in calculus until I jumped into the problem, so to speak. For differentiation, I saw myself in a freeze-frame animation moving along a curve. For integration, it was several versions of me superimposed on one another on a single point on that curve.
I have many intense interests, but my primary one is humanity: who we are, what we do, and what we can become. It’s easier to blend in when you’re doing what everyone else does by talking and using symbols. Because of that, I think people understand me all right most of the time, but I’m always steeling myself for quizzical looks when my thought processes reveal themselves unexpectedly.
I remember a lot of things that most people forget. It’s not as severe as full-blown hyperthymesia—I can use my long memory for practical ends—but some aspects are similar. I don’t consciously choose to remember those details. At times I like having all these memories; at others, I’d prefer to forget them. I have PTSD, anxiety, and clinical depression, so it’s sometimes torture.

Although I’ve become more comfortable over time with my being autistic, it’s difficult to cast off all the accumulated shame: shame for existing, shame for being “too much,” shame for seeing things differently from most people, shame that I could never make myself easily understood no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t help that my parents were emotionally and sexually abusive. They are homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, self-hating, deeply traumatized, hard-right evangelical Republicans who would vote for a flaming pile of shit if it had an R next to its name.⁴ They exploited my mind, body, and dignity for their own perverse and self-interested ends. I was treated like a card catalogue, Google Translate, a RealDoll, a pet—never like a person. Some abuse memories are filmlike flashbacks, but other incidents linger only as bodily memories, intrusive sensations, fears whose cause I’ve long forgotten. I suspect that my parents treated me the way they did for a few reasons: they isolated me to avoid reports to Child Protective Services, they have their own intense internalized ableism, and they simply didn’t know what to do with me. Although I can understand the last two reasons—I was doubtless difficult to raise—nothing in their past or present can excuse what they did to me. I hope they’ve never harmed any other child in their care.

On top of that, I grew up in a military family, where change is constant and stillness is brief. We moved every three to four years, going from state to state to country to country. (I have an especial dislike for jargon and alphabet soup because of all this; I can’t help thinking of all the military acronyms and initialisms—DoDDS, DEERS, PCS, TLF, BDUs, MREs, AFB.) Like other Air Force households, ours was organized as a strict hierarchy; we all had to know our place. Although my father was said to be at the top of this hierarchy, my parents shared power more equally than they would admit. Children were to be seen and not heard—or at least not heard too loudly. This is why I both need and fear attention: I want to be around people who also want to be around me, but I’m also terrified that if I stick my neck out, it’ll get chopped off.

Military families often organize themselves like units and battalions; individuality is subordinated to unit cohesion, family cohesion, national cohesion. Unquestioned obedience is the norm. You may be incoherent on the inside, but you’d better look sharp regardless. This may work for the troops, but it’s no way to raise a child. It was no great feat for eleven-year-old me to empathize with the characters in The Giver and Nineteen Eighty-four: these dystopias were just military-base life intensified ⁵. Of course Winston Smith was easy pickings for the Thought Police; he yearned for humanity in a world that despised the individual. I am terrified of a world shorn of all beauty, sense, and purpose—not surprising for a Technicolour child who grew up in a monochrome world of brown-and-tan buildings, impersonal bureaucracy, uniforms and uniformity. When I see people treated as numbers, I recoil—you won’t be remunerated well in the military, but you will be well enumerated.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four

(That boot is my father’s.)

I ran away from my parents when I was twenty years old and never looked back. I knew everything was all wrong; I could never love Big Brother. I shudder to think of what might have become of me—if there’d still be a me—had I not known people who were kind enough to help me flee. I celebrate the day I left—10 October 2006—as my “observed birthday.”

I pity my parents, but I can’t forgive them, despite all the indoctrination I heard as a child. Even if the abuse were emotional only, even if my parents’ evils were limited to shouting and belittling and isolation, they were evil nonetheless. There’s always a chance that your child may be an extreme statistical outlier. Improbable is not impossible, and people like me will always break ostensibly airtight statistical models. I am a statistical outlier, so I push against the reduction of incommensurable human life to statistics and figures⁶. (The universe is a troll, though, so I ended up studying sociology and public policy. My apologies to my statistician colleagues—you do good work! Just remember that people like me exist, too.)

I make connections that others don’t, but much of what we take for granted started out as those connections. Let’s consider language. It’s all around us, so we see it like air or water. People see and hear language as marks on pages or arbitrary sounds that are mere vessels of meaning. But let’s look at that a little more: natural languages use concrete descriptions to refer to abstract phenomena. Comprehension means grasping together. Description means writing down. To discover is to remove something from its hiding place. The words idea, wit, and vision are cognate—in the Indo-European languages, sight is the primary metaphor for knowledge. I suspect that the first users of language were ideasthetes. Our languages would be very different if they weren’t.

(This is why doctrinaire descriptivism fills me with existential terror—the model seems to neglect those of us who do see, hear, and feel spelling, grammar, punctuation, and usage as sensory stimuli. What are you doing, you monsters! You’re letting people hurt my friends.⁷ I can’t abide their sanguine predictions of radical linguistic change that we can never control—or their blasé attitudes toward so many of the things I find abhorrent. But I suspect they may think the opposite about us. How dare they change the flow of language? It’s its own phenomenon, and we’re foolish to change it. Being swallowed by the indifferent crowd, being laughed at for caring about style or beauty, being told that feelings and culture don’t matter—this is nightmarish, not reasonable. It just reminds me of my parents, the military, and the hell of my childhood. Apathy is the mother of dullness, so I resist it at every opportunity.)

This is one of the most difficult things I’ve written, since I bristle at the idea of showing too much vulnerability, too much sadness, fear, and trauma. But I’ve done a lot of difficult things this year—in the past six months, I’ve left a toxic nine-year relationship, started living alone for the first time after years of sharing with housemates, and started processing more of my trauma—so why not do another difficult thing?

I see my friends’ and colleagues’ faces as I write this, and hope you’ll understand what I’m talking about, at least a little. I do this for you, and I do this for everyone like me who feels alone in an intense, chaotic, and often frightening world.

I wish I’d known someone to show me the way when I was growing up. (I think I taught myself so much because there was nobody around to teach me.) I couldn’t understand how I was making connections others couldn’t see, even though they were as real as breathing.

But all of us, whether neurotypical or neurodivergent, rely on connections—social, symbolic, physical, mental, intellectual. Some of us make those difficult connections naturally. Others have to be shown the way. But all of us can make connections, at least a little bit—because that’s what makes us human.

Really, “I” is a misnomer; I’m just using it for your convenience. (I do a lot of things for people’s convenience.) ↩
It gives me a chill up the spine, though, to think that I was on a discussion panel with her last year. Over Zoom, of course. ↩
I am an artist, but I’m just good, not great. ↩
Donald Trump would qualify. ↩
(Lois Lowry, who wrote the Giver quadrilogy, was a military brat, too; I wonder whether it had an influence on the series.) ↩
I owe an intellectual debt to the late Jacques Barzun, who deplored what he called the “Stat Life.” It’s a recurring theme throughout his œuvre. ↩
I hate their constant mutilation of all right, one of my calming phrases. I repeat it to myself, all right, all right, all right. It’s a grounding mechanism: all will right itself. Two words, not one. Alright, on the other hand, is a false sense of security, a dissociative haze, a repugnant mixture of gloppy processed cheese and rancid vegetable oil that sticks in my throat. Allright is just a car crash that I can’t stop staring at. I hate seeing words wrongly run together—alot, aswell, atleast, eachother, and the like. They’re colliding into each other! Or maybe they’re like enmeshed couples who really need to break up for their own good. ↩

Baloney!

22nd March 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Imagine that I’m at a restaurant—Chez Snob—that purports to offer haute cuisine.¹ After spending a few minutes looking through all the choices on the menu, I decide on a steak with herbed butter, duchess potatoes, asparagus, and a glass of Veuve Clicquot.

Several minutes later, the waiter shows up at my table, proudly presenting me with a bologna sandwich made with soggy Wonder Bread, off-brand American “cheese,” gobs of cloyingly sweet mayonnaise, a single piece of wilted iceberg lettuce, and a tasteless watery tomato slice. Instead of the glass of Veuve Clicquot I expected, I receive a half-empty cup of grape Kool-Aid.

“Excuse me? This isn’t what I ordered.” The waiter shoots me a withering look, claiming that this bait-and-switch is acceptable because the restaurant adheres to the principle of “descriptive gastronomy.”

“After all,” he says, “most people are more likely to eat bologna sandwiches than haute cuisine.”

“But, sir, that’s not what I ordered. If I wanted a bologna sandwich, I would have made one at home, but I don’t even like bologna. And I certainly wasn’t expecting grape Kool-Aid.”

“Are you trying to tell me that bologna sandwiches aren’t valid food, or that grape Kool-Aid isn’t a real drink? That’s just a classist prejudice.”

“That’s beside the point. Bologna sandwiches may be food, all right, but I didn’t come to your restaurant for bologna. Even if you’re serving those sandwiches ‘ironically,’ they’re not what I came for.”

As the waiter continues to prattle about the merits of descriptive gastronomy and my unconscionable prejudice against bologna sandwiches, I turn tail and walk out of the restaurant, reminding myself to post a bad review online once I’m back home.

Let’s imagine another restaurant: Big Momma’s Bar-B-Q. Unlike Chez Snob, Big Momma’s is honest. The cashier tells you that you’re going to get pulled pork with tangy barbecue sauce, collard greens, coleslaw, cornbread, and baked beans, and that’s exactly what you get—good old-fashioned down-home cooking, all served up in white polystyrene containers filled to bursting. No frills, no bullshit. But the descriptive-gastronomy fans conflate Chez Snob’s bait-and-switch bologna with Big Momma’s pulled pork and baked beans. I know what I’m getting at Big Momma’s, but Chez Snob is serving junk and presenting it as fine dining.

We can extend the analogy further: picture a “descriptive” car dealership that claims to sell Ferraris and Bentleys, but the only cars on the lot are beat-up Chevrolets and Toyotas, or a “descriptive” art-supply store that sells you discount-brand markers that go dry as soon as you open them instead of the Derwent pencils you asked for, because “more people use these than Derwent products.” The course description for a “descriptive” graphic-design class may promise to teach students professional techniques, but the professor decides to teach you how to make flyers in Microsoft Word instead, all set in Comic Sans, Arial, Algerian, Times New Roman, Curlz MT, and Impact. After all, regular people design flyers in Word using system typefaces.

Most people will see the absurdity of Chez Snob’s bologna sandwiches or Honest John’s Descriptive Dealership, but far too many think similar attitudes toward usage and grammar are acceptable. People with these attitudes have made a fetish of amateurism and mediocrity that would be unacceptable in most other fields. They claim to defend Big Momma’s soul food, but they’re just shilling for Chez Snob’s bologna sandwiches.

Don’t be hoodwinked into accepting weak writing, substandard spelling, and unsophisticated usage because of “descriptive grammar,” as I was for several years. I worried that if I didn’t share those views, I would be oppressive or excessively critical. Defending African American Vernacular English and other dialects from racist and classist attacks is the right thing to do, but that openness needn’t extend to editorial nuisances like between you and I, alot, dining at it’s best, apple’s $1/lb, miniscule, ad nauseum, and your not serious. All these are the products of confusion, carelessness, and inadequate education, not distinct cultural practices and norms. Nonjudgmental research practices are no cause to denounce editorial standards simply because untrained or poorly trained writers don’t adhere to them. That’s just baloney.

Let’s just pretend that COVID doesn’t exist for this scenario. ↩

Words about Words

26th January 2021 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

I have opinions about language. Here’s a nonexhaustive list.

Accouterments. Admittedly, I dislike the entire concept of American spelling, but Webster’s changes are too entrenched to be jettisoned entirely. We can, however, safely reject accouterment, a needless variant that has never predominated in any English dialect.

Alot and alright. A lot of people use these, but their spelling isn’t all right. You may wonder why I’ve spent so much time on these unholy mash-ups of a lot and all right, but at least one writer has dedicated an entire book to ain’t.

Doubtless because anti-peevers have made alright their darling, I’ve come to despise this “one-word travesty.”¹ It’s a contractual obligation for anti-peevers to write apologias for it, and I groan every time I see one of them defending this hideous collision-course compound. I suspect the proliferation of alright in rock, pop, and hip-hop lyrics leads them to think that misspelling all right will grant them some kind of coolness by association. No, writing alright doesn’t make you look cool; it just shows that you can’t spell a common phrase. The cool kids won’t notice, and they’ll still think you’re a dork.
Alright is cheap, plasticky, ephemeral; all right, in contrast, is solid, substantial, real. Alright is Arial; all right is Helvetica. Alot, on the other hand, is Comic Sans or Kristen ITC. A lot would be something like Candara—relaxed and casual, but not crass.
I won’t say that alright isn’t a word: it is, but it’s not a very good one—in fact, it’s a nonword. Nonwords are technically words, but they have no reason for being. ² Other such words are alot, irregardless, and thusly.
Regard with suspicion any usage pundit who endorses—or worse, uses—alright. And if they defend alot, their advice is worthless.
If I had a dollar for every time someone claimed erroneously that alright was now standard, I’d be rich. The 2019 Google ngram data show that all right still predominates in printed books. In fact, the gap between all right and alright is the widest it’s been—there were more alright instances for every all right in the Seventies than there are now. There are more absolute alright instances than there were in the Seventies, but the proportion of alrights to all rights has decreased dramatically, since there are more absolute instances of the standard all right, too. There’s a slight dip in all right toward the end, but tonight, a lot, and today also decline at the same point on the graph without a corresponding rise in to-day, alot, alright, and to-night. (Perhaps there were fewer data available for 2018 and 2019.) Editors have been open to other compounds, such as today and underway, but alright just hasn’t caught on:
2019 Google ngram showing the predominance of “all right” in printed books

And alot is barely a blip:
Other compound words have gained more traction, such as healthcare:
The solid copyediting overtook the two-word copy editing in the Eighties:
Today overtook to-day about a hundred years ago, and tonight became predominant about a decade later:
The solidification of underway was underway by the 1950s, and the one- and two-word forms have been neck-and-neck ever since:
If I were forced to choose between ain’t and alright (or alot), I’d choose ain’t. Ain’t comes by its folksiness honestly, but alright is an impostor. I’ve come to personify it as Al Wright, an oleaginous used-car salesman who won’t shut up about his “great” deals. As for alot, even Sir Mix-a-Lot doesn’t use alot in his handle. Even the buffoonish irregardless is useful in dialogue, but alot and alright are mere pests.
Alright is an impostor because Modern English all-compounds (like all right) generally have the full word spelled out, as in all sorts, all-inclusive and all done. Words like already come from Old English. Al- is no longer an actively used prefix. I suspect this may be why alright was derided so early on. If we are to admit it, we must also admit alsorts, alinclusive and alnight.
Alot and alright may be slang, all right, but they’re not particularly good slang. Gonna and ain’t sound different from their standard counterparts. Aright, arright or the African American Vernacular English aight will do if we need to transcribe a syncopated pronunciation of all right, and alot has no benefit over a lot.
I use alot and alright as a litmus test when I’m reading fiction online. If I see them, I lower my expectations accordingly.

“But as there are books that are not books, so there are words that are not words. Most of them are usurpers, interlopers, or vulgar pretenders; some are deformed creatures, with only half a life in them; but some of them are legitimate enough in their pretensions, although oppressive, intolerable, useless. Words that are not words sometimes die spontaneously; but many linger, living a precarious life on the outskirts of society, uncertain of their position, and a cause of great discomfort to all right-thinking, straightforward people.” —Richard Grant White, Words and Their Use, 1882.

American spelling. Unnecessary, confusing, and often ugly, but we’re stuck with it. I’d just like it not to appear where it doesn’t belong; for instance, American publishers should let British spelling stand.

Around. Whatever happened to about? People are forever talking about conversations around COVID-19 policy, videoconferences around systemic racism, seminars around homelessness and unstable housing. It’s less euphonious than about.

Between you and I. Downright rebarbative. Even this ungrammatical expression has its defenders—typically descriptivist anti-peevers who are determined to love all the infelicities the rest of us hate.

Business jargon. Going forward, take it offline, incentivize, synergy, scalable, best-of-breed, deliverables, knowledge translation, technical assistance, parameters, key stakeholders, capacity-building, mission-critical, operationalize, grow the business, core competencies, buy-in. Give me a break.

Canceled. Bleh. The predominant spelling in World English is cancelled, so American editors should allow it.

Company names for software products. Although Google and Facebook have company names that match their primary products, Microsoft and Adobe do not. It is therefore an error to talk about “Microsoft” or “Adobe” as though they were themselves programs. “Microsoft” typically means Windows or Microsoft Office. “Adobe” means either Photoshop or Acrobat.

Descriptivists. Many self-described descriptivists are more accurately reformers—or deformers. The encroachment of extreme descriptivist doctrine on usage and rhetoric has done both fields a disservice. Usage and rhetoric focus on the social, semantic, and aesthetic components of language, while descriptivist practices focus on aspects of language that are beneath our notice. Meaning is secondary to sound and structure, which is entirely backward—language has value only because it is a social tool that conveys meaning. Speech and writing are conscious acts, but descriptivists have deprived us of our agency, and their insistence that their practice is objectively true prevents them from being gainsaid.

By marginalising everything ‘else’, linguistic theory implicitly makes very strong claims which are in no way ideologically inert when they are presented as the only ‘scientifically’ valid way of looking at the language. For the items thus marginalised are the sine qua non of language. —Roy Harris, The Language Machine

Esthetic. A self-defeating spelling. An ugly relic of early-twentieth-century spelling deformation—I mean, reform.

The generic he. This needs to die.

Glamor. Markedly unglamorous.

Gray. This should be a name, not a shade.

I could care less. Mildly annoying.

Impact (verb) and impactful. Irritating words that smack of business jargon. “Impactful” is particularly grating.

Individuals. Often used as a overblown synonym for “people.” I suspect the people who use it think, “Let’s add more syllables to sound more serious!” That’s if they think about it at all, of course.

Language change as an excuse for mistakes. Languages aren’t static, but that doesn’t mean that we must accept every nonstandard form that arises. (I’m looking at you, I could care less, between you and I, miniscule, and impactful.) We have the right to make choices about the words we use, and I refuse to say impactful.

Misused punctuation. Amusingly wrong.

The Oxford comma. I’m neutral. Sorry.

Permissive style manuals and usage guides. Neutral descriptions of usage, whether standard or not, are useful for researchers, but they’re less helpful in practice. As an editor, I need to make quick judgment calls, and wishy-washy statements are unacceptable. The writers of usage guides and style manuals shouldn’t shame or berate their readers; nevertheless, they should give clear guidance based on current editorial practice. (No, linguistic corpora that include error-ridden tweets, your aunt’s knitting blog, and YouTube comments don’t count.)

Scepter. No.

The singular they. Without question. I use it all the time.

Social-justice argot. Cisheteropatriarchy, kyriarchy, settler colonialism, problematic, erasure, bourgeois liberals, microaggressions. I agree with most of the principles, but do we need to use all this highfalutin language? Admittedly, I use some myself but avoid it when talking to people who don’t have a background in queer or feminist theory.

It’s especially irritating to see activist jargon mixed with management-speak, so we end up being incentivized to dismantle the cisheteropatriarchical paradigm by unpacking our settler-colonialist mindset around our role in bourgeois liberal society, and developing impactful strategies to foster inclusivity and to challenge the systemic erasure of marginalized body-minds. (And don’t get me started on people who manage to use activist jargon, management-speak, and random slang and pop-culture references. OMG, like, what a mess.)

Spellcheckers. Most of them are too permissive for my tastes. I edit as part of my work, and I want to be able to spot nonstandard terms when I’m editing. I use a custom spellchecker, from which I’ve expunged alright, irregardless, thusly, miniscule, and incentivize.

Theater. Yuck. The -er spelling feels rough and unsuited to the medium it describes. American editors should allow theatre.

Kingsley Amis (1997), The King’s English. ↩
Bryan Garner (2016), Garner’s Modern English Usage, p. 630. ↩

Collision-Course Compounds

1st December 2020 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Both novice and professional writers struggle with word-boundary errors. A common spelling mistake is to turn two-word phrases like at least and of course into Frankenstein’s monsters: atleast and ofcourse. Some of these errors are well known—the notorious nonwords alot and alright come to mind—but others, such as everytime, eachother, and aswell, are common in blog posts, social-media statuses, and personal emails. Based on an independent qualitative study I’ve conducted over the course of six months, the most frequent collision-course compounds are abit, alot, alright, aswell, atleast, eachother, everytime, incase, infact, and infront.

Avoid the following collision-course compounds—yes, even alright—if you want to preserve your credibility as a writer. I’ve bolded the incorrect spellings; the correct spellings are in parentheses after the mistaken versions.

Based on an independent qualitative study I’ve conducted over the course of six months, the most frequent collision-course compounds are abit, alot, alright, aswell, atleast, eachother, everytime, incase, infact, and infront.

abit (a bit) Abit is not a word. Use a bit.
afew (a few) A few is always two words. Afew, on the other hand, sounds like a sneeze.
afterall (after all) Overall is one word, but after all isn’t.
alittle (a little) The rampant use of alot has given rise to similar fake compounds like aload, afew, and alittle. A little is two words.
allday (all-day or all day) All day is always two words (either spaced as an adverb phrase or hyphenated as an adjective in front of a noun), just like all right and all sorts.
aload (a load) This faux word is yet another one of alot’s offspring. A load is two words.
alongwith (along with)
alot and allot (a lot) The standard spelling for the phrase meaning “many” is a lot, two words, although alot appears frequently in unedited writing. In fact, alot appears online more frequently than any other collision-course compound. It’s still wrong. Allot means to distribute. Where alot is found, alright, ofcourse, and eachother are likely to appear.
alover (all over) Alright has spawned even more collision-course compounds, including alover, alaround, and alsorts. The expression all over, as in “all over the place,” is two words. Alover looks as though it should mean “a lover.” All-over is the adjective form (e.g., “an all-over print”), although some dictionaries list allover instead. Regardless, all over always has two Ls.
alright and allright (all right) Alright is not all right. The overwhelming majority of usage experts and style manuals recommend using all right—two words, two Ls—and avoiding alright and allright. Alright appears primarily in unedited, poorly edited, and informal writing, typically out of ignorance. Ignore anyone defending alright; most alright apologists don’t write well anyway. In reviewing online postings (forums and story archives in particular), I noticed that the strongest writers leant toward the standard all right, regardless of their age or location.
alround and alaround (all round and all around) Alround and alaround are to alright as alittle and abit are to alot. All around and all round are two-word phrases as adverbs and are hyphenated (all-around and all-round) when they’re directly before a noun. Allaround and allround are wrong, too.
alsorts or allsorts (all sorts) Like all right and all around, all sorts is two words. Liquorice Allsorts is a brand name.
anyday (any day)
asif (as if)
aslong (as long)
asmuch (as much) Inasmuch is a word, but asmuch on its own isn’t.
asoon (as soon)
aswell (as well) Aswell is a surname; as well is a two-word phrase. Aswell seems more common in Britain, Australia, and Ireland than it is in the United States or Canada, but I’ve still seen Americans and Canadians writing it. Regardless of where you live, though, there is no such word as aswell.
atlast (at last)
atleast (at least) At least is always two words, though many people are under the impression that it’s atleast. This error is surprisingly common.
bestfriend (best friend) Teenagers on Instagram and TikTok may think bestfriend is a word, but it’s not.
boardgame (board game) A lot of people treat this as a one-word compound, but dictionaries still list “board game” as two words.
carpark (car park)
datacentre and datacenter (data centre or data center)
dataset (data set) This is properly two words, though it may become a solid one soon.
deadend (dead end)
eachother (each other) Each other is always two words. If you see people on social media spelling it eachother, they’re doing it wrong.
eventhough (even though) Although is one word, but even though is two.
everynight (every night)
everytime (every time) One of the most frequent collision-course compounds. Sometime and anytime can be one word, but every time is always two words.
filesystem (file system) This is still two words for now.
floorplan (floor plan) Some people spell this phrase as one word, but it’s not yet recorded in most dictionaries. Stick to the two-word version for now.
gameshow (game show)
golfball (golf ball)
goto (go to)
highschool (high school) Many high schools have failed to teach their students that high school is two words, not one.
highstreet (high street) Like high school, high street is two separate words.
icecream (ice cream) Ice cream is delicious, but icecream doesn’t exist.
inbetween (in between) In between is two words.
inapp (in-app) You can make in-app purchases, but to use inapp is inapt for any kind of writing.
incase (in case) In case you missed it, this expression is two separate words. Infact and infront aren’t words, either.
incharge (in charge)
indepth (in depth)
infact (in fact) Infact is not a word, despite what many people think.
infront (in front) In front is two separate words, no hyphen necessary.
ingame (in-game) You can make in-game purchases, but not ingame ones.
inorder and innorder (in order)
instore (in store or in-store)
middleschool (middle school) When you’re in middle school, you should learn that it’s separate words.
moreso (more so) More so is always two words.
neverending (never-ending) The film may be The NeverEnding Story, but the standard term is never-ending, two hyphenated words.
nevermind (never mind) Unless you’re referring to Nirvana’s famous album, never mind is two words.
nomatter (no matter)
noone (no one) No one is two words. Some style manuals also allow the hyphenated no-one, but under no circumstances is the pronoun noone.
notime (no time) Notime is not a word; it’s two.
ofcourse (of course) “Ofcourse” sounds like a character from The Handmaid’s Tale, but the expression of course is written as two separate words.
ohwell (oh well)
ontop (on top) On top is always two words.
otherside (other side)
otherway (other way)
outloud (out loud) Aloud is one word, but out loud is two.
peanutbutter (peanut butter) This tasty condiment is spelled with two words, not one.
primetime (prime time) Primetime isn’t ready for prime time, at least not as a noun. While some spellcheckers pass primetime, it’s not a standard spelling.
seabass (sea bass) The annoying fish on Animal Crossing is a sea bass, not a seabass.
showtunes (show tunes) Showtime is one word, but showtunes and gameshow are not.
shutup (shut up) This is never one word.
Superbowl (Super Bowl) There is no such sporting event as the “Superbowl.”
thankyou (thank you) Thank you is two words, not one.
upto (up to) Upto is not a word.
videogame (video game) Video game is still two words, not one.

The phenomenon isn’t limited to English, either; Spanish has a number of collision-course compounds, too, including almenos for al menos (equivalent to atleast for at least), deacuerdo for de acuerdo (similar to alright and allright for all right), and porsupuesto for por supuesto (equivalent to ofcourse for of course).

Sources

The Associated Press Stylebook, 2021.

Geoff Barton, “Geoff Barton’s 30 Essential Tips on English Usage for GCSE Grade C or Higher.”

Paul Brians, Common Errors in English Usage.

Gill Elliott et al., “Variations in aspects of writing in 16+ English examinations between 1980 and 2014.”

Robert Hartwell Fiske, Robert Hartwell Fiske’s Dictionary of Unendurable English,

Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage, 4th edition

John Grimond and Ann Wroe (eds.) The Economist Style Guide, 2018

Bill Walsh, Yes, I Could Care Less.

Ben Yagoda, How to Not Write Bad.

The Charge of the “Alright” Brigade

10th September 2020 by Finn Gardiner Leave a Comment

Pokémon has this one all right, but a lot of people don’t. (And it's not "alot," either.) — Pokémon’s spelling is all right, but a lot of people’s isn’t. (And it’s not “alot,” either.)

[updated 18 October 2020 to include more historical information]

Summary: Avoid using the nonstandard alright for the two-word phrase all right, which predominates in well-edited writing. Most usage writers—people who show authors ways to make their writing more effective—recommend using all right instead of alright. If you wouldn’t use thru or lite in a piece, don’t use alright—using alright in serious writing is like going to an in-person job interview in flip-flops and baggy sweatpants.

All right, I’ll admit it: I don’t understand the love affair with alright. I’m no knee-jerk prescriptive reactionary; I don’t give a shit if you say ain’t or irregardless in informal conversations, and AAVE is fine by me, but the standard all right seems to work perfectly fine. I’ve never seen anyone argue in earnest for accepting the erroneous one-word forms of a lot, as well, of course, or each other in formal writing, even though alot, eachother, ofcourse, and aswell are also common mistakes. Why, then, does alright get the hero’s welcome when other spurious compounds don’t? Writing manuals, usage guides, and dictionaries will include notes about alright, but the arguments are little more than “Because I said so!” There are perfectly valid reasons to avoid alright, but they’re difficult to find in most usage manuals. Nevertheless, the pro-alright arguments are even weaker. I’ll address the most common ones here.

Argument 1: But “alright” is like already and although!

When people hear common phrases, they may process them as units even if they’re not written that way. That kind of thinking results in spurious compounds such as alot, alright, ofcourse, and bestfriend. When I was about four, I thought may as well was “mayas well” before I actually saw it in print.

Alright beguiles the unwary writer through its superficial resemblance to standard adverbial compounds like already and although. The analogy is less justifiable than it seems at first glance. The already merger makes sense, since all ready and already have very different meanings. The same applies to always and altogether, neither of which are the same as all ways and all together. All right can mean either “satisfactory” or “all correct,” but so does fine. OK can mean “acceptable,” “passable,” or in “good working order.” The spelling of fine doesn’t change to fyne when using it in the “OK” sense. Terms such as all right, OK, and fine are ambiguous in themselves; changing the spelling doesn’t resolve that ambiguity. The same applies to very well, which can express agreement, strong approval, or resignation. The phrase has not become “verywell,” except in the name of a health website. The weaker meanings of OK, fine, and all right are extensions of the stronger ones, but it’s less clear that already means “happened before,” but all ready means “all prepared.” Terms such as all right, OK, and fine are ambiguous in themselves; changing the spelling doesn’t resolve that ambiguity. Already had a reason to be distinguished from all ready, but alright is no different from all right. It’s an impostor that apes the appearance of a legitimate word by dropping the second l. If people were routinely writing “allright” instead, I can’t imagine anyone would give it the time of day.

Claims about the nonliteral nature of all right can also be used to defend ofcourse, aswell, and alot, none of which are acceptable.

Lexicographers—people who study how words are used and record those uses in dictionaries—record alright as a variant of all right, but it usually comes with a usage note saying that it’s less appropriate for formal writing than the two-word form. I’d go further and say alright shouldn’t be used at all. All right is invisibly correct, but alright will stand out to people who know the standard spelling. Alright is as different from all right as center is from centre, though regional spelling differences are defensible on cultural grounds. Alright, however, is no more acceptable than thru and irregardless. Dictionaries show how people actually use words, not how they should use them, which is why common nonstandard expressions such as ain’t, alright, and irregardless appear as entries.

Argument 2: Well, I like alright better than all right!

I must confess that I hate alright. Hate hate haaaaaate. (Unless it’s in a song title, then I’ll let it slide. But all right still looks better.) I think it’s an ungainly Frankenstein’s monster of a “word.” There’s no accounting for taste, but if you really want to use alright, be prepared to defend your decision; convention makes its use more trouble than it’s worth.

While alright appears frequently in unedited writing and popular media, it’s still considered nonstandard. For at least 120 years, usage commentators, editors, and stylists have recommended using the two-word form and rejecting the solid compound. Most people who spell it alright don’t even know that it’s supposed to be all right, anyway; usage-minded alright-ers are rare. If they cared about correct usage, they wouldn’t be spelling it alright. I’ve seen some people using alright on purpose to stick it to the Man; this practice is juvenile, not liberative.

Sometimes I worry I’m fighting a losing battle, but then again, people have been trying to make alright standard for more than a hundred years. I don’t think all right is going anywhere anytime soon—the 2019 update to the Google Books corpus shows that all right still predominates in print books. Moreover, the majority of British and American literary and journalistic style manuals ban alright. Journalists consider saving space when devising standards for spelling, punctuation and typesetting; if alright were worth the trouble, journalistic style guides would have adopted it. Editors have accepted other compounds over the past century—the formerly hyphenated today and tomorrow come to mind—which suggests that alright just doesn’t pass muster.

The following style manuals forbid the use of alright:

The Associated Press Stylebook, the standard manual for American journalistic writing, says, “all right, never alright.” The rule still stands in the 2021 version, released only a month ago. Newspapers love to save space, but they’re not trimming the space and “l” from all right to do it.
BBC News isn’t particularly stuffy with usage, and it’s been quicker to adopt certain one-word compounds (e.g., the positively Teutonic “styleguide”) than other outlets have been, but alright is still off-limits. The wording is similar: “all right, never alright, except for the television programme It’ll Be Alright on the Night.” The emphasis is theirs.
The US Government Printing Office’s style manual lists all right as the preferred spelling.
The New York Times is no friendlier to alright: “all right, never alright.”
The Chicago Manual of Style says that all right should be written as two words, and to “avoid alright, which has long been regarded as nonstandard.”
The Economist’s style guide includes all right in its list of two-word phrases.
The UK’s Daily Telegraph (aka the Torygraph) dubs alright an “abomination.” I wouldn’t go that far. I think John Scalzi would, though.

Some style manuals, such as The Guardian’s, equivocate about the acceptability of alright, but even these will note that alright is unacceptable to traditionalists. As far as I know, no style guide recommends alright over all right, and I’ve only seen one—the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s manual—that explicitly allows both. All right is unimpeachable, but alright is a much dicier proposition.

If you still really want to use alright despite all the warnings, be consistent about it. Don’t use all right in one paragraph and alright in the next. Go big or go home, y’all.

Conclusion: Alright isn’t all right, but I won’t correct your texts

My verdict: Don’t bother with alright; it’s a distraction. Would you use alot, eachother, or aswell? Then don’t use alright.

Rest assured I won’t correct your social-media posts and text messages. Promise. Pinkie swear. I was just talking to a friend the other day who spelled it alright. Want to know what I said to them about it? Absolutely nothing, because I’m not an asshole. If I’m editing your work professionally, however, it’s going to be all right. In these unprecedentedly troubling and uncertain times (insert mawkish piano music here), I think we need a full-bodied all right, in any case. All right? Good.