Alright, all right, I’ll write it right!

I was recently doing some very focused, very important research for my book (read: listening to Pandora and StumbleUpon-ing) when I came across a rather disturbing piece of information:

Alright is not a word.

Now, I am not the type of person who regularly finds myself committing this kind of error. In general, I’m the annoying stickler who corrects other peoples’ use of things like apostrophes, or the non-word “irregardless.” So it came as something of a shock to find out that I have been so wrong.

In the past, I’ve used both “alright” and “allright,” using each for different purposes. In my misguided view, I thought that “all right” meant that everything, every item, was right, correct, or satisfactory, while “alright” meant ok or fine. So if you asked your professor how you did on the final, and she said, “It was all right,” that would mean you’d gotten every answer right, whereas if she said “It was alright,” that would mean you had passed, you’d done ok, but not great.

I’m still a little attached to this concept, but I don’t want to come off as some grammatically clueless writing noob, so I’ll be changing this in my fiction from now on. For my own personal use, though, I think I’ll keep this particular error; after all, language is fluid, right? Words have meanings because we give them meanings, and new words are entering our vocabularies all the time. Ten years ago, “friend” would never have been a verb, and “facebooking” would have been nonsense. So go ahead, you legalistic grammar fascists. Do your worst. Alright is all right with me.

What do you think? Is alright an acceptable word, and if so, does it have its own meaning, distinct from "all right"?