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 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
