> The version of "Jive" on the Dialectizer site is a souped up version of that code...

I'm going to hijack this thread to start a conversation about something that has been on my mind a lot lately.

The English language is very dynamic, and while a lot of purists may not like the way definitions and even sometimes spellings "evolve" with time, I think it is safe to say that the evolution of language is necessary, if only to allow us to discuss new concepts. (Bill Watterson put it well in a Calvin and Hobbes strip discussing "verbing" -- access may have once been only a noun, but its use as a verb is very intuitive and useful, and there are many examples like this.)

The thing that has been on my mind specifically is the translation of verbal colloquialisms into written form. While I can't guarantee that the phrase "souped up" originated from the idea of making something "more super", I have always assumed this to be the case, and hence I would assume that the spelling should be "suped up". On the other hand, neither souped nor suped is a real word, and while most of us know how to pronounce it, a formal spelling has probably never existed.

The example of this sort of thing that bothers me the most is the use of the word "till" in a phrase like "He partied till the cows came home". This is obviously a contraction of the word "until", and I always assume that it should be spelled "'til", but "till" seems to be in common usage.

I know that I've seen conversations with a number of regulars on this forum about the importance (or lack thereof) of keeping the English language as pure as possible and avoiding the AOLer-style mangling of words. ("And I don't care... How they spell it... On the internet.") WHat I'm wondering about now is the more borderline cases, like the ones above, and especially the translation of common spoken phrases into written form. (I had another example of one of these on my mind just a couple of days ago, and I'll post it if I can remember it.)

So what do the rest of you think?

Don Monkey