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And of course, the change isn't overnight, no one turns a switch and suddenly everyone switches from "to-night" to "tonight". It takes time, in the early phase, people are starting to use "tonight", while others shake their fists that the error. And then towards the end, you have the last hangers-on using "to-night" and fists are shaken at them for their "error".
Of course, not every deviation is an evolution in language, some things really are mistakes. Language tends to change when the new version is clearer or simpler than the old version. "I'm going to the movies to night" could be read as going to the movies to perform some action called "night", if someone thought that night was intended as a verb. Adding the hypen adds clarity, but it was only an intermediate phase.
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