On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Alexander Hall <alexan...@beard.se> wrote:
> On 02/18/13 19:48, Nick Holland wrote: > >> On 02/17/13 04:54, Jason McIntyre wrote: >> >>> On Sun, Feb 17, 2013 at 01:29:00PM +0400, Nick Permyakov wrote: >>> >>>> Hi, >>>> >>>> I might be nitpicking, but the sentence "This will take awhile..." at >>>> the bottom of >>>> http://www.openbsd.org/stable.**html<http://www.openbsd.org/stable.html>doesn't >>>> seem very >>>> grammatical to me. I'd suggest fixing it to read "...take a while...". >>>> >>>> Best regards, >>>> Nick Permyakov >>>> >>>> >>> i thought it sounded strange too, so i looked it up. from collins >>> cobuild: >>> >>> awhile: "Awhile" means for a short time. It is more commonly >>> spelled `a while', which is considered more correct, especially >>> in British English. >>> >>> so i don;t think there's anything wrong with it, as such. having said >>> that, it's written in the context of a make build. i wonder whether the >>> author really wanted to suggest a short time ;) >>> >>> jmc >>> >>> >> "a while"/"awhile" means a short time? wow. I've always used it as >> meaning "a long time". 'course, I usually say it with a sarcastic tone, >> so maybe it's the sarcasm that gets the point across. >> >> I've changed it to "This will take some time. Depending on the speed of >> the system, it may take less than an hour to a week or more." >> > > Not that I'm a native English speaker, but I've never ever interpreted "a > while" as a _short_ time specifically, but mostly as a fair but reasonable > amount of time relative to the context. > > But then again, what's the definition of "short"? I guess that's depending > on the context, too. > > /Alexander > > i asked native english speaker, apparently, taking awhile is always 'sarcastic', and never short. It is fun to know that the sarcasm is exactly the same in french. <<Cela va prendre un moment>> moment is short, but it means a completely undefined time, probably not very short. so the sentence was correct, the 'manual' was wrong -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- () ascii ribbon campaign - against html e-mail /\
