“In matters of taste,” said the Roman orator, Cicero, “there is no point arguing.” Taste, style, whatever you want to call it, is a subjective and changeable thing. When I was a young (male) lawyer, wearing brown shoes was a fashion crime. Then it was a fashion. Nowadays we barely wear suits. Needless to say, none of these clothing choices said anything at all about whether you were good at the job.
Style, too, is a form of personal expression, a way of telling the world who we are, or, at least, what kind of mood we’re in. “Buttoned-up” isn’t just an expression describing someone who is formal and a little rigid: it is a description of how formal, somewhat rigid people choose to dress. If we describe someone’s clothing as “rumpled” we are also describing a person who is not “buttoned up” at all, but, quite possibly, a wee bit disorganized.
What style is not, however, is an unbending, unchanging law. Back in the day, I had a lawyer colleague who wore brown shoes in a world of black. Disapproval was expressed, but no one stopped him from doing his job and he was absolutely, positively, not carted off to jail. My big sister’s desires notwithstanding, “fashion police” is not actually a thing.
Unless, of course, one is a writer. We don’t call the authors of style guides fashion police, but that’s what they are. They lay down vast tomes filled with the “rules” of good writing, which most of us do our best to follow because we are good literary citizens who don’t want to be seen breaking the law.
Except these are not laws. They are, for the most part, subjective expressions of taste. If you’re American, “onto,” like “into” is usually a single word. In British English, “onto” is the mark of an illiterate. And yet does it really matter when I say that “Ahmed jumped on to the table” as opposed to “onto the table?” Of course not. Either way, the meaning is perfectly clear. Come to think of it, in the previous two sentences, I’ve put punctuation (a comma and a question mark) inside the quotes – and used double quotation marks to boot – the American practice. If I had banished the punctuation to the outside and used single quotation marks like the British, would an American reader have found what I had written incomprehensible? I certainly hope not. (Confession: even when growing up in Britain, I used double quotation marks unless my English teacher objected. I just like the way they look!).
Which brings me to “all right” as opposed to “alright.” The style guides are virtually unanimous in stating that “alright” is a vulgarism and that the correct form is “all right.” I have never understood this. Or rather, if we’re going to be pedantic, I understand this perfectly well. I’ve just never found it very persuasive. I think “alright” is perfectly all right.
As with all matters of taste, this is a largely (but not entirely) subjective preference on my part. To me, when I say “alright” out loud meaning “OK,” it sounds different to when I say “all right” meaning “everything is correct,” so I like to use different spellings. And (this is not subjective) if you write something like, “Your answers on the test were all right,” do you mean that they were 100% correct (all right) or merely that they were sufficiently OK for a passing grade (alright)? Using the “vulgarism” here would remove the ambiguity. On top of that, we already say “already” and “altogether,” so why not “alright”? Finally, according to the OED, alright’s etymology stretches back over 1,000 years, which ought to be enough of a pedigree to allow it into polite company.
I don’t get upset when I see “all right” written in circumstances where I would use “alright.” It is, as I have said, a matter of taste. But when my agent suggests, as he has, that I correct “alright” to “all right” in the manuscript of Braking Day because it’s a “pet peeve” of his, I did raise an eyebrow. And I’m not going to do it!
Well, I’m not going to do it voluntarily. My final edits to Braking Day are now done (yay!!!), which means the manuscript will soon be sent off for copyediting. I doubt the publishers will let this slide. When they finally pull me over, I will exit the vehicle quietly with my arms raised in surrender. Because in publishing, as opposed to haute couture, fashion police are totally a thing.