Mind your language
I am going to air a shocking proposal, now that we’re safely into 2008. It is about all right. Can it be alright?
The question is posed by a thoughtful reader whose letter I have left on the kitchen table in Gloucestershire, I realise. He has spent his life religiously (well, I don’t think he said religiously, but that’s the drift) writing all right. Suddenly it has occurred to him that, if we have already, why not alright?
In a challenging example he gives, it is impossible to distinguish the meaning: ‘Her answers in the examination were all right.’ Were all of them correct, or were they merely acceptable?
Yet the advice from the wise Robert Birchfield in his edition of Fowler is not encouraging. Alright, he finds, is ‘hardly ever used by writers of standing’, but it is, on the contrary, ‘commonplace in private correspondence, especially in that of the moderately educated young’. In the 12 years since he wrote this, the moderately educated young have ceased to write correspondence, except in the form of emails.
Since this question rivals only the split infinitive in attracting disapproval, one might at least ask why, apart from sociological convention, alright is not all right.
The earliest use cited by the Oxford English Dictionary is in The Pickwick Papers (1837): ‘“Stand firm, Sam,” said Mr Pickwick, looking down. “All right, sir,” replied Mr Weller.’ The sense here is of acquiescence, and this sense is also conveyed adverbially (‘I got your letter all right’). The phrase can be a predicative adjective (‘That’s all right, Mama’, as Elvis sang) or an attributive adjective (‘It was an all right evening’ — not a usage I employ).
So the yoking of all and right is a recent development, not found before the 19th century. The parallel conjunction of all and ready happened 500 years earlier, when uniformity of spelling was absent and orthography was no social shibboleth. Before the advent of printing, already was spelled already, al-ready or all ready, with further variants. In 1495 Wynken de Worde was happy to set it in type as two words (alle redy). In 1526, Tindale makes Romans iii 9 ‘We have all redy proved.’ But the Authorised Version of 1611 makes Ecclesiastes i 10 ‘It hath beene already of olde time.’ (Printers of the Bible silently modernised spelling as time went on.) So the spelling already became settled in early modern times. The parvenu all right appeared at a period of universal education and standardisation. I do not see how it can be changed now.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
