Column: A Word, Please: To stay a while or awhile, that is the question

Baltimore Sun copy editor extraordinaire John McIntyre uses the term “dog-whistle editing” to refer to tiny editing issues that only copy editors notice (and perhaps only copy editors care about).

“Which” in place of “that” is an example. Both AP and Chicago editing styles forbid using “which” in place of “that” to introduce a restrictive relative clause, as in: “The hat which he wore was brown.” For editors, that’s a no-no. But everyone else can make their own decisions. Grammar rules aren’t as strict as those editing styles.

I don’t know if the difference between “awhile” and “a while” qualifies as a dog-whistle editing item. After all, this isn’t based on a mere style rule. Confusing “a while” and “awhile” can constitute a grammar error. But it’s dog-whistle-esque because almost no one but us copy editors notices.

“Stay for awhile.”

That is, technically, a grammar mistake. A preposition takes as its object a noun phrase — a noun or pronoun with or without modifiers. “For” is a preposition, but “awhile” isn’t a noun. It’s an adverb. So it can’t be the object of “for.”

“A while,” on the other hand, is a noun phrase. It can be the object of the preposition “for.” So “Stay for a while” is correct.

But now look at these two examples: “Stay awhile.” “Stay a while.”

These are both correct. You can use either the adverb or the noun phrase after a verb. But to understand why, you need to know about adverbs as well as adverbials.

Adverbs aren’t just those words that end in ly. Adverbs are a class of words that express time, location or manner, or add modification to whole clauses. “Unfortunately, they were out of ice cream.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.” “Tomorrow” is an adverb expressing time.

“I’ll meet you outside.” “Outside” is an adverb expressing location.

“I’ll meet you gladly.” “Gladly” is an adverb showing the manner in which an action took place.

“Unfortunately, they were out of ice cream.” “Unfortunately” is an adverb adding information to a whole clause.

And all that comes on top of the adverb job you already know well — modifying verbs, as in “Sleep peacefully.”

“Awhile” expresses a time element — specifically, a duration. So dictionaries categorize it as an adverb. It can modify a verb like “stay,” as in “stay awhile.”

But here comes the hard part: A noun phrase that expresses a time element or duration is an adverbial. So “Stay a while,” which uses the noun “while,” is correct.

Why? Because you don’t have to be an adverb to function as what’s called an adverbial.

An adverbial has the same function as an adverb: to express time, location or manner, or to add modifying information to a whole clause. But unlike an adverb, adverbial isn’t a class of words. An adverbial can be any word, phrase or clause that modifies either a verb, an adjective or a complete sentence to convey this information. In other words, adverbials aren’t necessarily adverbs.

Here’s an example of a single noun modifying a complete sentence adverbially: “Tuesday, the garage is going to get a good cleaning.” Tuesday isn’t an adverb by most dictionaries’ definitions. But it functions as an adverbial when it adds “when” information to the sentence.

Prepositional phrases and whole clauses can do the same. In “You’ll find us in the garage,” the prepositional phrase that starts with “in” adds location information to the main clause. So the whole prepositional phrase “in the garage” is an adverbial. Similarly, in “After we eat breakfast, we’re going to clean out the garage,” the clause that comes before the comma is modifying the main clause with “when” information, so this whole clause qualifies as an adverbial.

As for “a while,” it’s a noun phrase. As we saw with the word “Tuesday” in our above example, nouns can work as adverbials. That’s why “Stay a while” and “Stay awhile” are both correct.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is the author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at JuneTCN@aol.com.