Which Word When - The Second in a Series

among/amongst amid/amidst If you live in England, or were raised there, or live in a country that was once a member of the British Empire, or are an especially dedicated Anglophile, you can get away with using the words amongst and amidst. They mean, after all, the same as among and amid. If, however, you do not fall into one of those categories, you're best off keeping things simple with among and amid. (Whilst I’m at it, let me add that there’s actually a difference between amid and among – when among things, those things should be countable, while when amid things, they should be uncountable or abstract, as in, “I stood among my friends, amid all the confusion.”)   a while/awhile A while means “a period of time” and awhile means “for a time” (in other words, the for is included, so you wouldn’t write "for awhile" because in essence you’d be writing "for for a while"). Algernon stayed awhile; actually, he did nothing but sleep for a while. etc./et al. An abbreviation of et alii (“and others”), et al. refers to people; etc., an abbreviation of et cetera (“and other things”), refers to things only. Gwendolyn was joined by Jack, Gribsby, et al. Cecily brought along books, magazines, DVDs, etc. due to/because Due to means “caused by” or ”resulting from” - if you can substitute “attributable to,” then due to is okay. Because, however, implies a cause and effect. Many of the laughs are due to what Lady Bracknell says, such as, “Thirty-five is an attractive age. London is full of women of the highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.” Miss Prism gets few wild laughs because her lines just aren’t as clever.

Note: Last week I wrote about the difference between than and then, and used a few lines from "Romeo and Juliet" as examples of their proper use. In response, I received a note from a friend who's an English professor at a university here in Chicago: "I've been meaning to send this to you - Shakespeare's a really tough place to go for homonym standards, since the earliest printed texts don't observe some of our rules or differentiate the words we now separate/distinguish/spell differently. So here's your example from the end of Romeo and Juliet, in what's considered the first substantive edition (1599):

I haven't looked to see whether the slightly earlier edition or the First Folio has it with "than," but it's quite possible. All our editions clean up the spelling according to modern rules.

 

Pedantically yours..."