a different angle::While

Whilst::while    Style::article    Small::special    English::while    Which::would    Should::archaic

a different angle Landed here whilst ;) reading up on this, not sure which one to use for transcribing someone else's slightly muffled recording and deciding to use the objectively "right" word. For some reason, with a British cultural and educational upbringing, "whilst" seems the right one ("whil{e/st} the transformation is taking place") - it seems to "fit" the sentence better, in the same way that other words with multiple end forms do (e.g. "a" vs "an"), suggesting there's some rather deep and multiply-reinforced but nonspecific imprint of it been made on my mind somehow.

This would kind of fit in with what I saw from one of my other sources - on the first google search results page for "while whilst", but unfortunately a forum thread and therefore but a hop and a skip away from OR... can't remember if they cited THEIR sources... anyway, this other linguistical person's view was that "while" could be used both in the coincidental and the contrasting sense (the thing that leads to the confusion in the example sentence about playing and working), while "whilst" makes the clause an exclusively coincidental one. IE by using it, we emphasise that one child is working at the same time as another plays, rather than the alternate sense that, in general, one works BUT the other plays. This may explain why I initially "felt" it to be the correct choice for that sentence, too.

Any of our well-reviewed sources back this up? Unfortunately I have landed on google, wikipedia and the like because it's a lot easier than the walk across campus to go and find a dictionary that may help ;) (it would however be a british one... I can only find american-standard ones online). 193.63.174.10 (talk) 08:58, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Talk:While sections
Intro  [[Talk:While?section=_Utter_nonsense_interpretation_of_The_Times_and_The_Guardian_style_guides_| Utter nonsense interpretation of The Times and The Guardian style guides ]]   Multiple Choice    Usage    My idiolect    \"While and whilst\" section    Use of \"while\" to mean \"until\"   The English/American conflict   a different angle    Replaced page after deletion    Thee and Thou    Sources & anti-whilst snobbery    Clean up time    \"While\" need not introduce a clause    Blacklisted Links Found on the Main Page    External links modified   

a different angle
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