Why do two words sometimes become one when the process has nothing to do with creating an adjective (and hence has some rationale at least)? There seems to be a tendency for the preposition 'in' to become permanently attached to a word that commonly follows it; to wit: 'infact', 'inturn', 'instore', 'inorder', to say nothing of the ubiquitous 'alot'.

I can see that we can confuse ourselves with many words that have both one word and two word forms, depending on meaning ('any one', 'any way', 'may be', 'can not', and so on), but what is the linguistic process or reason for joining words when there is no difference in meaning between the old and the 'new' form?

As our distinguished predecessor Dr. Johnson said, "Ignorance ma'am, sheer ignorance."

Bingley

>two word forms, depending on meaning (....., 'can not', and so on)<
Hi Lucy,
Could you please explain the difference in meaning of 'can not' vs. 'cannot' to a foreigner like me? By the way, it's not my intention to start infighting between the experts here...

can not = the ability to not do something (but usually has another word between the can and the not, for example, we can always not go) or represents can followed by, for example, not only (She can not only sing, she can also play the harp).

cannot = inability to do something.

Bingley

>what is the linguistic process or reason for joining words when there is no difference in meaning between the old and the 'new' form?<

Lucy, I don't think this is going to help at all, but some languages don't separate words with spaces when writing.

Someone (Bingley? I forget) made a post a week or two ago about 'what is a word?' I think this may be relevant here.

If the writer thinks of a word as 'a unit of speech expressing a unit of idea' (which I am not necessarily saying is the corect definition, by the way!) then on occasions when a 'unit of idea' actually requires two words in English, that writer might be tempted to join the words so as to get down to one 'unit of speech'.

When I look at the examples you quoted, they all seem to make sense from this point of view.
Personally, I detest them, but I'm trying to understand the writer's thinking.