Maz's confused virtuality

Well, I write out 'all right' every time Spike uses it! And would use it as an answer to the milk question, yeah. I've been thinking about Wombat's distinction, actually, and have a feeling that I don't have a sense of any primary, literal meaning of 'all right', so the phrase is always the 'alright' sense of the phrase. 'All right' to me basically means 'yeah' or 'OK' or 'fine' - or 'how are you' (when it's got a question mark, obviously). I could maybe swap in 'alright' when it's specifically the greeting sort of 'all right' where the expected response is just another 'alright/all right' rather than any real information (which I'm really bad at responding to properly but recognise when it's used), but otherwise I don't see it in my head. 'Is everything all right?', for example, isn't a tautology to me - and 'is everything alright?' doesn't make sense.