A few weeks ago I talked about the t-shirts that were sold at my old high school with the wrong 'who,' right? But so many people still bought them, why is that? Just because it was common and most people didn't notice the difference should it be allowed to go unnoticed?
Or here's another example. All over the internet, etc. I have been coming across 'alot' of misspellings. A lot is two words, yet so many people still do it. Is this okay? Can we just turn a blind eye to the fact that it might just be the language evolving? After all, words like 'okay' became 'ok' for simplicity. My argument for 'okay' is that A) 'ok' has that well known red squiggle under it as I type this now. And B) 'ok' is easier to type for sure, but it comes across as more casual.
But 'alot' and other misspellings are technically two words that can function on their own. You can use them separately or together and don't change meaning when they are together. I would call this a definite typo. And just because it's common, doesn't mean that it isn't one. Like using the incorrect who on a t-shirt, they all sound the same when spoken, but they all have distinct meanings, even it they are minorly different from each other.
An even worse example is at the book store I work at. We had a Christian book that was being sold for several months before one day someone came in and pointed out that there was a major typo. And sure, maybe no one had noticed until then, maybe the reader's brains had just auto-filled the correct statement. But everyone knows that Jesus didn't come "to bring to pass the [immorality] and eternal life of man.” (Improperly quoted Moses 1:39, obviously.) One simple letter, yet the book wasn't corrected for a couple weeks, we just added basic loose leaf notes until they gave us corrected copies. But just because the typo wasn't noticed for an extended period of time, shouldn't make it acceptable. (Or in this case morally correct.)
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