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 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." Nick.
