till

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:18 AM -0700 10/1/01, Arnold Zwicky wrote:
>pretty much all the standard authorities agree with you on this
>(and add that TILL is the older form).  see, for example, the
>usage note at TILL in AHD4.
>
>this one's a perennial.
>
>i find TIL or 'TIL unacceptable, and some editors find TILL
>unacceptable, so sometimes they all have to be replaced by UNTIL.
>
>an extremely tiny point, i grant.
>
There's also the irony that some earlier prescriptivists railed
against the use of "until" on the grounds that it was redundant,
given "till".  (Maybe that information is contained within the AHD4
usage note Arnold mentions; unfortunately my hard copy of the
dictionary is at home at the online version at bartleby is returning
91889 "relevant results" for TILL (and the same 91889 for UNTIL),
none of which (or, I should say, none of the first couple dozen of
which) have any obvious connection with TILL (the first such listing,
for example, is for "D & C", followed by other randomly arranged
abbreviations).  Weird.

larry