ahold

[Baker, John]

        Very civilized.  What are your views on supercede and alright?

John Baker


-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
Of Arnold M. Zwicky
Sent: Monday, June 13, 2005 12:18 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: ahold


On Jun 13, 2005, at 8:49 AM, FRITZ JUENGLING asks me:

> How 'bout  "for awhile"? Does that bother you?

as MWDEU points out, the spelling "awhile" for the object of a
preposition has been very widely deplored, but it is nevertheless
very frequent.

this is entirely a matter of spelling, and in matters of spelling my
own practice is pretty conservative; english spelling is full of
arbitrariness, so spelling is one place where i think a fairly high
degree of uniformity is desirable.  i myself would write "for a
while", especially since "while" here is modifiable, as in "for a
(very) long while", in which case the article "a" must be separated
from "while". (similar reasoning applies to "alot" and, as i pointed
out in my first posting, "ahold".)

but i recognize that widespread nonstandard spellings always have a
good motivation and are not evidences of ignorance, illiteracy, or
anything of the sort, so i don't froth at the mouth, despair that
civilization is coming to an end, or peg the writers who use them as
inferior beings.

i notice "for awhile", but i understand that that's mostly just me.
i don't alter it in my students' writing.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)