A colleague pointed at a line in my status update that said I check this everyday and told me it should be two words. I have written it as one word since school and I now cannot unsee it in anything I have ever sent. Is there a rule that actually holds up, or is it one of those things people just enforce randomly?
Worth knowing that the big shop slogans use the one word version deliberately and correctly. Everyday low prices means ordinary low prices, prices for everyday life, not prices that happen each day. Seeing it right in the wild is what finally fixed it for me.
Same family of traps if you want to fix them all at once: anymore versus any more, awhile versus a while, and altogether versus all together. Each one is a single word adjective or adverb next to a two word phrase that means something more literal. Learn the pattern once and you get four rules for the price of one.
Mild disagreement with the certainty in here. Nobody in the history of email has been confused about your meaning, and this pair is drifting the way alright and a lot are drifting. It still matters in anything formal or public facing, because a reader who knows the rule will notice and quietly downgrade you, which is a real cost even if the rule itself is arbitrary.
The quiet downgrade is what happened, honestly. Nobody was confused, somebody just thought slightly less of the email.
No argument about the cost being social rather than logical. That is exactly why it is worth the two minutes to learn rather than two years of quiet judgement.
One word means ordinary. Two words means each day. That is the whole thing.
@rough_draft_rob · 2d ago · 3 replies
There is a rule and it is reliable. Everyday as one word is an adjective meaning ordinary, as in everyday clothes or an everyday occurrence. Every day as two words means each day. Swap in the word ordinary, and if the sentence still makes sense you want one word, otherwise you want two.
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@curious_wren · yesterday
The other direction works too. If you can say each day instead, it is two words. I check this each day is fine, I check this ordinary is not.
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@smalltalk_sol · 2d ago
Ordinary and each day as a swap test. That took eleven seconds and thirty years.
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