I'm inclined to suspect that someone who lived during this era had a pretty good sense of how ordinary "else" was at the time.

I would not be surprised to learn that "else" is more common now thanks to programming languages.

> Christopher Strachey's CPL programming language is the grandparent of C and therefore the ancestor of most current programming languages, and he refused to use "else," calling it "ignorantly incorrect English."

Given how hard it seemed everyone who designed languages tried to avoid using the word, it would seem Strachey's view was not uncommon.