I love it when it comes to demystifying the underpinnings of the English language. I find a great pleasure to discover those things that are taken for granted by the masses to be right but in fact are only conventional fallacies. Just as an example when I finished typing the title of this post I noticed that the word ' anymore " has a red underline. I right clicked on it for correction and it suggested another version which is " any more " with a space between any and more. I felt like embarrassed, how come an English teacher, edublogger and Master student commit such a stupid mistake? But deep inside I felt there was something wrong , it is impossible that "anymore" should be "any more", why would it be after all ? " It must be my word editor's fault " I went on, and to stop this aimless musing I took my case to the judge Google. Here is what I found :
Opinion concerning "anymore" vs "any more" divides roughly into three camps:
- 1- There is no such word as "anymore". It is simply a misspelling.
- 2- "Anymore" and "any more" are two ways of spelling the same thing, and the two have the same meaning.
About the first two camps, little more needs to be said. Either statement stands on its own and needs no elaboration.
- 3- There is a useful difference in meaning between the two.
The difference in meaning considered useful by the third camp is that "anymore" is an adverb meaning "nowadays" or "any longer", while "any more" can be either adverb plus adjective, as in "I don't want any more pie", or adjective plus noun, as in "I don't want any more."
The difference between the two meanings is illustrated in the sentence: "I don't buy books anymore because I don't need any more books." ( source : English Usage )
After reading the above explication a couple of times I realized that I belong to the third camp. Anymore in my post title should be spelt with no space between any and more because it is an adverb that means any longer. I felt good my word editor did not defeat me , at least this time.
Spelling is something very important in language writing. It actually tells a lot about the writer. Sometimes I would get comments on this blog from people about certain misspellings in my articles. While I know that I am not perfect and that apart from the mistyped words you would sometimes find in my writings because of the constriants of time on me, I admit I have done some serious misspellings and I was lucky to be notified by some of my readers. But sometimes, however, some readers do not defferentiate between what is regular and irregular verbs or between American and British English and that is why I would get a comment from one of them telling me to correct the spelling of ' Learnt " to " Learned " or " spelt " to spelled " when in fact both versions are correct. In fact there are dozens of other examples I could cite here but let me just leave it here and let you explore these ten words you should never misspell.
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Very helpful. Thanks.
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