M-W acknowledges till, 'til and even til, FYI.

A search through google books confirms that 'til is widely used in print, so I am obliged to concede!

Interestingly, although it has become acceptable through usage (like most words), the form 'til came about through complete ignorance. The original word is till, and much later came until. Those two spellings have exactly the same meaning in modern English. Then in the 20th century some writers formed the corruption 'til because they thought that till was an abbreviation of until and that it needed an apostophe and spelling correction. They were wrong, but now we have 'til.

The most "correct" form for modern American writers is until and both others are considered informal, with till now tending towards poetic.

yeah, till it gets used in some skanky ass sentence packed with hookers and fellatio

#WSOP01 Players are now on their penultimate break of the evening. Cards will be back in the air in 20. http://************/cgk7da8

Ironical

Teehee. I'm gonnae use this the next time I wind up the French.

So I've been thinking about the inadequacies of grammar and, more specifically, punctuation. Yes, I know there's a reigning status-quoist paradigm here and elsewhere with respect to language as we find it: you scrupulously learn the rules, you apply them judiciously, you prosper. You don't challenge anything.

But why can't we chat about tinkering with English as we find it? Why can't we at least discuss various innovations?

For example, punctuation: I strongly feel there's an available slot, as it were, for some kind of mark falling halfway between the period and the comma. Yes, the semi-colon and the em-dash can sometimes serve this role, but the former has come to require independent clauses on either side of it (quaint exceptions aside) and the latter has this air of ambiguity about it that I find messy: Is it a break? An aside? An equals sign? A pause?

Therefore, I would like to propose the ".." as a new punctuation mark indicating a pause somewhat longer than a comma and shorter than a period.

Here it is in action!

First, the old-school method: The problem arises during the sentence fragments. We want "Unreal, in other words" to read as a singly grouped phrase, and "a false alarm" to read as an added elaboration after a small breath.

So we try a period. But the pause feels too strong. We can resort to it if no better solutions appear, but why submit to the existing regime, is my larger argument here. We could use an em-dash, or replace the period with a comma, but I've already mentioned my difficulty with the dash (confusing) and a comma blurs the distinct grouping we want.

Another tactic might be this: "Unreal in other words, a false alarm." The comma works now by sheer force of relativity, but we've had to expel the first one to accomplish this, and we lose control over the punctuated pacing of the first four words, which read as a single (and I think more awkward-looking) burst.

Normally, we'd be told to settle for one of these solutions, or worse, be offered that loathsome suggestion: rephrase. A joke of a suggestion more often than not, offered way too hastily by people too weak to confront actual sentence-level problems. "Just rewrite the gosh dang thing! Sure, you lose the exact wording you're aiming for! So what? Better that than having to think through tricky problems!"

New school: Et voilà, people.

Someone kickstart a twitter campaign (#dotdot4lyfe?) and if we're lucky, it'll start catching on and we'll rock our pause indications all the harder.

Samuel Beckett says hi .. although he used ellipses for that.

In terms of time, I perceive it exactly as I'd perceive ... these pauses ... assuming it's clear that the ellipses are pauses, not omissions of certain words. If that weren't clear, though, a lone ellipsis would seem like a longer pause than a lagdonksis.

In your example (lagdonk) it looks and sounds exactly like an ellipsis to me. With the same purpose too.

Yes, I guess an ellipsis could be the best answer if we confine ourselves to what exists.

And also, I'm now thinking I should have chosen something other than ".." to represent my proposed mark.

See, I have this unreasoning prejudice against ellipses, and try to avoid them at all times (except when proposing new punctuation marks, evidently.) They just tend to read to me as cheesy gimmickry:

"And in the darkness he saw ... A SEVERED HAND!"

Or:

"I wanted ... I don't know ... something ... a woman ... or lacking that ... A SEVERED HAND ... you know ... like on my penis."

But I need to reexamine my feelings on this matter. I sense I'm being way too unfair to the old ...

That second instance of "A SEVERED HAND" is ****ing hilarious, lol.

Check this out.

Although it's a monologue (skip to 2:50):

(Man, I totally should have gone with a "," as my mark and given it an irresistible name, like "the armored comma.")

Bonus points for identifying where this is from:

Here's a quick reference.

They're looking for their car over there, but it's in its slot over here.

Maybe appropriate is people said pro' instead of pro. But they don't.

What is wrong with this?

What is the function of the apostrophe on that sign?

Probably more than one cash game.

It is an arrow to the sign up (noun) of the (possessive) cash game.


Yeah then it's definitely wrong.

I guess the sign could be interpreted to mean what you're saying it means, although I'm fairly sure the writer didn't intend to convey it thus. I certainly didn't understand it this way. And as someone else pointed out, the apostrophe (if one is indeed necessary) belongs after the s, as there is more than one cash game being played (although I don't know for how much longer, as the room is steadily declining in the number of customers brave enough to play there).

I like language, and even though English isn't my first one, I always try to write as correctly as possible. Sometimes however I stumble upon the correct spelling of a word that I've been spelling incorrectly all my life, which always astounds me. For example for the longest time I've been writing "definately" (yuck, I know), until someone online (a native speaker) who I always regarded as someone with bloody excellent spelling and grammar wrote "definitely", which made me look it up.

Today is one of these days. I've been Internet-Time-Travelling back into my youth, and when reading about the Album "Nevermind" by Nirvana, I came across this on Wikipedia.

So I looked up "nevermind" which I've been using like this ever since I considered myself rather fluent in English, and lo and behold, there's no such word as "nevermind".

I did a search for it in this thread and got three hits.

Apparently all three of the above people also use this word in a way which should actually be: "never mind".

I've never posted in this thread before for the obvious reason that I'm not a native speaker, but this time apparently I found something that a lot of you guys use incorrectly as well.

Please also feel free to point out spelling or grammar mistakes in this and other posts of mine.

Thanks.

How do you differentiate between someone saying "pro" and "pro'"?

"Nevermind" is just one of those not-in-the-dictionary-but-nevertheless-commonly-used words. Similarly, "Alright" is not listed in the Merriam Webster dictionary (although they have a paragraph noting its usage and the debate surrounding it), but it's used quite a bit, including by me.

It's a word but it doesn't mean the same thing as "never mind". All the examples posted are absolutely incorrect, because the verb phrase is always two words. The common use you refer to is a common misuse.

The one-word form is a seldom-used noun listed in some dictionaries, to be used in a sentence like "Don't pay him any nevermind" or more commonly, the atrocious "Don't pay him no nevermind." In that use it is a synonym for attention.

Cite?