I lose count of the number of times I enter passwords every day. Sure, there are a few brave souls trying to fix that, but it’s a way off yet. I still think, though, that for all its ubiquity, login is broken.

I’m not necessarily talking about interfaces here (although I’ve seen some truly egregious specimens): I mean the word “login”. Log in is an example of a phrasal verb:

Now, if you accept the convention that button text should be a verb phrase in the imperative form (“connect to server”, “launch torpedoes”, etc), you want the second person singular form: log in. Not login. You don’t login to a website any more than you goin to town, eatup your meal or shootdown spurious grammatical examples.

If you think about it, login is clearly not a verb:

• I logged in
• I logginned (?)
• I logan (?)
• I logun (?)

So where does “login” come from? Well, check this out:

• He is so hung up on this phrasal verb thing.
• That’s just one of his many grammatical hang-ups (or hangups, if you prefer).
• I looked up her number.
• The lookup algorithm on my phone is hideously inefficient.

See the pattern? Phrasal verbs get turned into nouns or adjectives, and the space between the verb and the preposition gets sublimated into a hyphen, or evaporates altogether. So, you can talk about “the login screen”, or “automatic login”, but not “please login to get started”.

A similar thing is happening with “every day” and “everyday”:

• This shirt is great for everyday usage (adjective)
• I wear this shirt every day (adverbial phrase)
• I fail at grammar everyday (wrong)

…and there’s a worrying tendency to use “into” wherever the words “in” and “to” are adjacent, even if it makes no sense:

• I finally gave into her demands.

Hey, wow! It’s another phrasal verb! Since in is part of the verb to give in, you can’t squish it up with to. Really, you should only use into when you’re crawling up inside something like a warm kitten. Which is not as often as you’d think.

It’s one of those weird grammatical tweaks that requires a bit of knowledge to get right, but I think that’s why it gets on my nerves so much. Still, a little bit of consistency would be nice.