Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
An example: I was reading a book recently in which the author was fond of using the word "awhile", but was clearly unaware of the grammatical difference between "awhile" (an adverb meaning "for a length of time") and "a while" (a noun meaning "a length of time"), and hence kept saying things like "we stopped for awhile", which is just plain wrong; you can say either "we stopped awhile" or "we stopped for a while", but not "we stopped for awhile". That was a commercially published book, too. THAT'S the kind of thing that bugs me.
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Isn't awhile one of those American words, like backseat? If it isn't, it is very common with American writers.