You can feel how cathartic this must have been for someone

On the one hand, a sign like this definitely did have enough room for the full spelling of "through". There seems to be no reason to abbreviate it.

On the other hand, isn't drive-thru just, like, its own noun now? Part of me thinks this was always spelled correctly.

It seems like shorthand for signs that has been used enough that it's basically normal now, like "lite" instead light, or "donut" instead of doughnut.
- Right, the distinction I'm making is this isn't just "normalized" but actually the correct spelling. As in, if a newspaper editor saw it written as "drive-through" they would be obliged to correct it.
- "lite" has a different meaning (or at least connotation) to "light"
- Ohh I thought donut was the American spelling of doughnut.
- Donut is straight up just another way to spell doughnut, though. It's fully accepted, and not shorthand.
According to Merriam Webster, “thru” is an acceptable, albeit less common, variant of “through”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thru
- Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive. They don't decide if something is "acceptable", just if it is widely used enough to report. If a mistake becomes common, it will enter the dictionary.
Maybe they meant, only drive on Thursday?

Don't get me started on "donut" instead of "doughnut".

Deez nuts are my favorite
Surely you mean doughknot?
How do you feel about hiccough?
- A little bit angry.
"Donut."
Oh I will. (─ ‿ ─)

I wonder what the Venn diagram of prescriptivists and graffiti artists is

Yes.

Wy do yu insist so strongly on writing thre mor letters that do nothing to chang the pronunciaton of the word? Ar yu French?

If ther's on thing I hat, it's words ending with silent e's. And whil we'r at it, we ned to get rid of doubl e's as well.
- I don't mind silent e's, they do actually change the way words are pronounced at least.
- Dubl e's mak sens thou. Ther's a diffrenc between feed and fed, or between need and Ned. The dublin maks the E longer.
few word do trick
I agre. It maks no sense.

If you want to be more accurate it is a Drive Next to, unless you drive through the building to get your food.

Oil change places where you don't get out of your car are drive through, everywhere else is a drive next to.

You drive through the line not the building
- You mean you drive along the line not through it.
Car washes too!
I would go with "Drive Around", over drive next to, but I pedantically agree.
The etymology follows the drive-in which is basically a big parking lot you drive in to, do your ordering/eating/movie watching in your car, and then you drive out. And when you don't stop in the middle of a drive in, but instead you continue through it, in your car, it became a drive through.
The pedantic term is a drive-up, btw.

Americans don't like "ou" in their words.

So it is thereby, by law, and without question, "Drive throgh".

For a moment, I thought, this was a misprint and they had to officially get out a spray can to complete the word...

Loved the show Dress to Kill by Eddie Izzard. He thought thru was much better than through coming to the conclusion that through should be pronounced like thruff.

You say erbs, and we say herbs. Because there's a fucking h in it.
- I don't think the British need to pick the "who's worse about skipping letters" fight. Lol
- The only reason you pronounce the H is because at some point the brits decided dropping the H made you sound low class. So congrats on perpetuating the elitism
- do you have a flag?
My father used to tell me that ghoti was pronounced "fish."
GH as in rough,
O as in women,
TI as in ration.
- Yup. That's a pretty common one to explain the whimsy of the English language
- That's not how any of that works.

there are two "l"'s in cancelled, i will die on this hill.../s

Merica gave England that other L.
- language, though imprecise... brings a methemetician's paradise
I'm in the same boat when it comes to gasses and busses.

Darn. They missed the hyphen.

Ah, yes, the drive thro-ugh
- Ugh, not again
- *facepalm

Kinda sad where you live in a state where every little misspelling or mangled punctuation causes such stress.

that's why I got out of California
- Go to Georgia. You can just make up your own pronunciation to things and people will just roll with it

How about drive throo?

Sounds Canadian.

Thru /throo͞/

preposition, adverb & adjective

Through.

preposition

Alternative spelling of through.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition • More at Wordnik

Just a quick reminder that dictionaries are descriptive, they document existing language use rather than set down rules.
If enough people break an existing rule often enough, it makes it into dictionaries. Just ask anyone who doesn't think that "ironic" should mean "coincidental".
- Lexicon is pretty important.
- Literally
- I was with you until the end, but I refuse to let Alanis Morisette order the dictionary around!

Drive-thru

Hi-way

Tonite

Rite

These spellings are extremely pervasive at my workplace and they drive me nuts. Granted, many people there are non-native English speakers. But that just means the people teaching them English are doing it wrong.

Do you spell "to-day" with a hyphen too? Because that's how it used to be, therefore it is correct

Lynne Truss approves.

I should thank her for writing such a boring, tedious book filled with "old man yells at cloud" energy that it started me on the path away from prescriptivism.
- Jeez. I thought it was amusing.

Also: Aluminium.

Aluminum came before aluminium.
- Alumium came before that!
  ...shoulda just left it at that.
- Weird that Americans want to go with Aluminum when there’s also Americium, Berkelium, and Californium. Not to mention Deuterium, Helium, Iridium, Lithium, etc..
If we're going to be consistent with other elements, it should be Aluminum, that way it matches Molybdenum and Platinum, the only 2 other elements ending in "um" (please don't check this).

Weird Al