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I Stand Corrected, Sort Of

© Barb Alexander

In a fit of pet-peeviness yesterday, my supervisor and I got into a conversation about grammatical mistakes that really get our goat. We immediately learned that we share a gripe: till.

As in, "I can't wait till the work day is over."

This makes us both want to scream, "It's until ! And if you insist on a shortened version, go with 'til."

Just to be on the safe side, I grabbed the dictionary on my desk, the 2000 version of the American Heritage Dictionary. And there, as definition number two of till, is until.

Even worse, there follows a usage note which not only indicates that till and until are interchangeable, but also that till came first ! Aaaaccckkk!

It seems that, the prefix un- was added, meaning "up to," and that some time after that, in the 18th century, the spelling 'tillbecame more commonplace, standing for a shortened version of until (much in the same way that we now would use 'til). In all this jazz, keep in mind that spelling was not standardized until sometime during the 19th century!

I found myself in a similarly-corrected situation not to long ago. A coworker of mine who sometimes enjoys getting under my skin with phrases like "I done did that" and "alls you have to do" started describing something on one of our company Web pages as having a certain "heighth." I normally don't correct anyone's spoken English (I stopped doing that in junior high after being told it is pretty darn rude), but thinking he was trying to get to me, I looked up height so that I could confidently state that, no, there is no "heighth."

Well guess what? It's not commonly used today, but heighth was the original word in Old English! The t and th endings were interchangeable during the Middle English period, and then the t ending predominated after the 15th century.

So what is the bottom line? As my dad always said when I was growing up, "Look it up." I don't mind being corrected at all. As long as I have the right information, I'm happy. But there's still something about till that I don't like!

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