“ALL RIGHT” AND “ALL ONE”.

“ALL RIGHT” AND “ALL ONE”. I posted here about how the linguist John McWhorter had convinced me to abandon a lifetime of loyalty to prescriptive grammar and to embrace usage as the test for grammar. McWhorter has a new book, WHAT LANGUAGE IS. This review by Erin McKean (August 10 Wall Street Journal) cites an example in the new book that supports the argument that definitions of words should also follow usage: “We’re happy with ‘alone,’ although it was originally ‘all one’—but we don’t like ‘alright,’ which could be formed by the very same process from ‘all right’.”