"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:17 PM -0400 7/16/10, Ann Burlingham wrote:
>On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 10:10 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
>>  Subject:      Re: "Till Death Do They Part"?
>>
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>>
>>  At 7/16/2010 09:37 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>>What's wrong with "till"?  Dictionaries love it.
>>obje
>>  I'm not a dictionary, I don't have to love it (without an apostrophe).
>
>I've never had a problem using "till" to replace "until."
>
>-Ann, till the cows come home

One line of research seems to suggest (supported by OED cites) that
"till" has been around as long as "until" has, if not longer.  The
rise of "'til" (with the apostrophe) stems from the belief (mistaken,
AFAIK) that the monosyllabic variant arose as a truncation of the
bisyllabic one.  At least some prescriptivists (I seem to recall
reading this in Dennis Baron's history of prescriptive grammar)
objected to "until" because of its pleonastic extra syllable,
although I'm sure others objected to "til(l)" as a bastardization of
the legitimate form.

LH

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