this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (7 children)

And still I maintain that "alot" is not a word.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Mine, too! I hope Allie is doing well these days.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

She made a reddit comment a couple months ago

https://old.reddit.com/user/OtherTubemonster/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

God i love alot

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 months ago (7 children)

I've noticed a tendency of people to combine words that are frequently seen together: "alot", "aswell", "noone", etc.

Some of these catch on, like "nevertheless" and "whatsoever". Maybe eventually "alot" and "noone" will become standard English, too.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

The way alot, aswell and noone are combining is expected given how many other words we don't bat an eye at went the same way. "another" is the perfect example, it's just "an other" combined.

It's sort of the reverse of what happened to words like apron and newt.

The division and bracketing of phrases changes over time.

"An apron" is the modern usage of the word "napron", and a newt was originally called an eute. The grammatical need for "a" and/or "an" resulted in the root word being rebracketed and changed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"Apart" and "a part" are opposites, though. If you're a part of something, you can't be apart from it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Yes, and increasing number of people are using the former to mean latter.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I recall "noone" being taught as acceptable by my english teacher back in 2004. That being said, she's also said some things that ended up being very wrong

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Whenever someone says “Noone wanted this” I always picture a big Irishman who has a deep appreciation for stuff Internet people are against.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

it's all just made up. you can see old writings without spacing. or punctuation. you can't even define what's really a word universally. people just decided what's what and standardized it at one point just for some consistency. that doesn't mean things won't change; they most definitely will.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ampersand is another good example. "&" was considered the last letter of the alphabet for a while. Schoolchildren would recite the alphabet and finish it with the phrase "and, per se and" ("and, meaning and").

The words got mashed together over time and the word "ampersand" was born.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

"Per se" means "in itself", so it's a shorter way of saying "also the word 'and' itself".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I always imagine Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits whenever someone does that.

"Noone thinks I have a lovely daughter." Yes, Mrs. Brown. Noone does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

No body writes noone as one word because there's a similar word written that way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Frankly this wouldn’t be a problem if it weren’t for “another”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Which some who use "alot" consider as two words.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I feel like that sort of misses the point. That really has to do with how we transcribe verbal speech into written. "A lot" is absolutely a phrase, I don't imagine you'd disagree with that.

[–] Squirrel 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think spellings and punctuation are still valid. Mostly. Ignore variations between English and Americanese.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

In not the Americans' fault that the English decided to butcher their own language after the US kicked them out

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The spelling differences are actually mostly due to Noah Webster standardising what he saw as pure Anglo-Saxon English without corruption by French princelings.

[–] Squirrel 2 points 3 months ago

Hah, that makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

England and all its former colonies (except the American ones) agree on the language, and the only odd one out - the United States feels it is unique among former colonies and its parent nation as the sole owner of the most correct version of English.

Seems likely /s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I know this is all a joke, but Canada doesn't share the UK's... proclivities with language

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

That has to do with the definition of what a word even is (an open problem!). "Alot" is clearly made up of two separate units, but so is "anyway". I think a lot of people don't like this one because it's simply unnecessary. You need "anyway" to show that the two words are not stressed separately, but treated as one unit, whereas with "a lot" this is already obvious ("a" is almost never stressed).
Also has to do with English spelling just being bad, generally.