"We Live In The Dark Ages"

...as a colleague of mine so eloquently put it. We'll get to that eventually, don't worry. To start the story, I was first hoping to find a way to write at all in a colloquial kind of way. The purpose was to convey the pronunciation more like əɾɔɫ or əɾɒɫ which I wasn't really sure how to do, just as I'm not even 100% sure on what vowel goes there. (The purpose is to get something like gonna, coulda, dinna, so on and so forth if it's not transparent.) After a minute of thinking about it, I thought that a'tall seemed to be a decent variant that didn't look hideous to me, so I decided to investigate.

Remember the original title? Google apparently doesn't do search strings that contain punctuation. Well, it does them, but it converts the punctuation to a space. I tried to use google to find a solution, but most people had nothing in terms of a solution for searching with specific punctuation. So, because of this, I get all of the results for "a tall." It seems a viable option for me, but I guess my only method now is some field testing.

It's a shame that google doesn't yet contain even an "advanced search" method for punctuation specific searches. I've had this dilemma come up before, but usually never something I couldn't work around, such as adding some context to the search.

This yielded two result from a few contexts I tried.

This page contained the text

"Thank you, Seiya. For being my friend and for understanding
and...for just being you.""Not a'tall my dear," Seiya said. "Walk me to my car?"

and Google Books yielded two books, both by Johanna Lindsey, but it looks like they are the same story in two books with slightly different titles, one is The Present and the other The Holiday Present, which includes another story. The relevant passage is:

"...you couldn't have been more right."

"Not a'tall m'dear." He grinned at his wife.

So, ol' bootstrapping can still get you a bit of evidence. I don't have any alternatives that sound any better to me, so I'm good with this for now.

Also, the aforementioned Seiya is written as 星野 in Japanese, the first character means something like "Star" which is relevant to the characters name, but I'm not entirely sure about the second part, at least for the name. Further proof I need to practice my Japanese more.