It’s probably happened before, but this is the first time I’ve noticed it: Common usage has trumped the dictionary in an entirely illogical way. Language changes, it evolves. That’s why we no longer speak Elizabethan English, with all its thees and thous and t’wases. That’s why new versions of dictionaries come out regularly. Slang becomes common enough that it virtually replaces what it is slang for, and a new dictionary entry is born.
But this one just doesn’t make sense. The word till has many definitions, from the drawer of a cash register to what you do to soil to prepare it for planting. The word until has long been shortened (Don’t you love that juxtaposition?) to ‘til. But that’s how it’s been spelled, with an apostrophe to show the first part of the word is omitted. Sometimes the apostrophe was left off. That’s still okay.
But now till has become a preposition in its own right. Which would be fine except for one thing. The word until only has one L! If you’re going to make it a preposition, at least just shorten the actual one, don’t add letters to it. Contractions and abbreviated forms of words never add letters. They take away letters.
For a long time, I denied this was even a bona fide word used in this manner. But every dictionary I checked – even the Oxford American Dictionary – includes till as a shortened form of until. Very few of them even mentioned that it is sometimes written til or ‘til.
This is very disturbing to me. I can handle changes in the language, I can handle it becoming more colloquial. But this is just wrong! You do not shorten a word by adding letters to it. How does that make any kind of sense?
Ah, well. What are you gonna do? And yes, gonna(sigh) can now be found in most dictionaries.