"Till Death Do They Part"?

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jul 16, 2010, at 7:50 PM, Larry Horn wrote:

> 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:
>>>
>>> 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.

note that "until" (prep. & conj.) is etymologically the old preposition "und" 'up to' + "till" (prep. & conj.), and (as you suggest) the two have been around, together, for a long time (since the 13th century).

pretty much all the usage handbooks say that "till" is standard, period.  Brians specifically lists it as a "non-error".

>  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.

the writers surveyed in MWDEU range over a lot of territory on the spelling 'TIL:
  correct in standard English
  absurd
  poetic
  superfluous
  acceptable only in informal writing
GMAU 3rd ed. says it is flatly incorrect.

i haven't seen research on the spelling 'TIL, but it *is* recent (on the order of 1100 years more recent than TILL is).  it would be interesting to see some actual research on its frequency over time, but lots of people have the impression it's been spreading (i do too, but such impressions are undependable).  MWDEU in 1989 thought it was very rare in formal writing; i wonder whether that's changed.

arnold

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