Today’s assault holds a special dose of vinegar because it inverts the usual way this mistake gets committed. In a New York Times article about the Congressional scuttling of a temporary federal funding bill, Hakeem Jeffries is quoted thusly:

House Republican have been ordered to shut down the government and hurt every day Americans all across this country.

I’m ignoring the politics involved here, except those of grammar, usage, and mechanics. Usually when writers mix up every day and everyday they use the latter to refer to every singled blessed day. This is wrong. When referring to all of the days, every single one of them, there must be a space because we’re using the adjective every to describe and restrict the noun day. However, when we want to describe something as being routine, mundane, ordinary, etc., no space is used. Make the compound word everyday to describe the noun of your choice. In the paragraph above it’s Americans.

I’m tempted to say the above error actually hurts everyday Americans right now, not in some undefined future, but the mistaken usage likely slipped right past most of them. The everyday/every day error resembles those involving into/in to and onto/on to. In the case of today’s horror, the most common format for every + day would be with a space. Non-proficient writers usually slam them together making this supposed-to-be uncommon word more common in print these days. I suspect the reverse is true for the other two, but I’ve no data to support this.

Author’s role: I’m going to assume this error found its way into print due to the author, not an editor. This is a writer for the NYT, one of the premier news organizations in the world. The author should know better. We therefore rate this a 4.

Egregiousness of the error: The error will be read by most readers to mean what the author intended. As explained in the first Reader’s Horror, these space-oriented mistakes where a compound word is used when it should not be represent one of the many confusing aspects of English. Since most readers won’t notice it and will get the intended meaning, we therefore rate this a 2.

My personal reaction rating: I sigh, shake my head slightly, and mutter, “but of course.” Immediately thereafter I also say, “but it’s still wrong.” That makes it a 1.

Final rating: This error rates a 4/2/1 for an 7 out of 10 on the Reader’s Horror scale.

[Note: I’m tweaking the scale, and I’ll write a quick update later. The egregiousness rating above became a “2” instead of a “3” as a result.