For the next few weeks, Mondays shall henceforth be devoted to zombies due to the airing of new Walking Deads on Sunday nights at 9pm Eastern on AMC. Until I come up with a zombie-related common usage error, we're moving usage day to Wednesday! Uhh????? That's right. Wednesdays. It's the perfect solution.
Which brings me to something I like "a lot": when people spell it as two words.
"A LOT" > "alot"
While looking up fancy usage dictionary entries for "alot," I found that everybody's got a rule for it but nobody's got a reason for it. According to The Columbia Guide to Standard American English, it's considered "substandard," and according to various other usage dictionaries, examples of "alot" have only really been culled from emails and tv transcripts. Some modern grammarians (you know, the cool ones) have decided that "alot" could be fine for shorthand, but it's still not standard. So don't put it in your papers.
Those are the rules. The only good reason I can come up with is that "a lot" must refer to a large (metaphorical) space capable of containing very much. Like a parking lot. If you filled up a parking lot with your shit, you'd have a lot of shit. In this way, my reason would be that English as an evolving language simply hasn't yet decided to include "alot" in its variant-spellings pool. It probably will in a few hundred years.
In the end, who cares? We all know what you're talking about. In the grand scheme of grammar, this rates pretty low.
THX ALOT 4 REDING!
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