Losing the Battle Every (space) Day

I'm happy to say that today I finished, more or less, my Christmas shopping. Everyone seems to be in a good mood out there, even with jammed parking lots and traffic snarls near the shopping malls.

But one thing that (slightly) dimmed my Christmas cheer was the realization that I am losing the battle against adverbial "everyday." Now as a linguist, I am not a prescriptivist; language has to be allowed to grow and change, because it will anyway, whether you allow it or not. Linguists describe what happens; they don't dictate what should happen.

HOWEVER. Descriptivist that I am, I still think think, as a man of letters, that the resources of a language that lead to clarity of communication should be both used and preserved. That's why my heart sunk when I entered a store that advertised LOW PRICES EVERYDAY.

Now you and I both know that it should have read LOW PRICES EVERY DAY. The single word everyday is an adjective, to be used attributivally: "everyday prices." The phrase "every day" is an adverb. This useful distinction is disappearing.

In a previous chapter of my life, I was an editor/proofreader at an ad agency here in Cincinnati. I fought the "everyday" battle... well, every day. It got people pretty riled up sometimes.

AD EXEC: Why won't you sign off on this job? The client is complaining.
ME: It's got a mistake in it, see? It says everyday here, one word, but it should be two. Everyday, one word, is an adjective, but you want the adverb here, there should be a space ...
AD EXEC (shrilly): Nouns! Verbs! Adjectives! Adverbs! Am I supposed to diagram every ***ing sentence in the ad?
ME: Couldn't hurt.

Now it feels like no one is on the watch. Maybe it's time for the proofreader to hand over the job permanently to the linguist.