everynow

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

correspondent mike gillis reports:
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on a whim I typed 'everynow' into google, thinking that it would get
very few hits except for perhaps artistic uses.

It got 11-thousand-something, and I noticed that nearly all of the
first page were hits for 'everynow' and then. So I checked, and the
phrase "everynow and then" gets about eight thousand hits. It seems way
too many to be all typos... although the phrase "every now and then"
gets around a million hits, "every nowand then" and "every now andthen"
only get a couple of hundred hits each.
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so "every now" (in the idiom "every now and then", and with lesser
frequency, in the idiom "every now and again") has followed "every
time" and "every place" -- these two are in MWDEU -- in having a
sequence of words that is pronounced as a unit spelled (by some people)
as a unit.  "everytime", "everyplace", "everynow".  sorta (or kinda)
like "alot" and "alright".

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), yeah, yeah, wanna, hafta, oughta,
useta, and so on