h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Unmarried fish because of religioius reasons perhaps?

In Dublin chippers I ask for 'a single' and get a bag of chips.

Ha! It's the opposite (sort of) here.

A 'fish supper' is fish and chips. A single fish is fish sans chips.

The guy wanted two sausages and two fish, but wrapped for three people, one of whom would be getting two sausages and the other two a fish each.

It was a stunning example of linguistic sophistication, I thought.

What is the difference between await and wait?
(indeed is there a difference?)

According to the OED, await means to wait for, or to be in store for ('a surprise awaits you' is their example). Wait can mean to defer an action, be expectant or on the watch, await an opportunity/one's turn. There are other meanings, but those are the ones where wait and await have similar meanings.

Await is transitive, wait is intransitive.

You await *something*, but you just wait . . .

Waiting for Godot could have been called Awaiting Godot.

Quite.

Hello, British English Thread - welcome back to my conversations!

I'd not seen this before (Ms Stress tuning in to the craft channel for her quilting & me on the way to the shed - a banner for some craft sales)

Did I see it?

advertarial

Sorry, that should be

advertorial

Advertorial (an advertisement that looks like editorial content in a magazine / newspaper / whatever) is a word that goes back to 1946 according to Merriam-Webster. In the UK they have to clearly display the word 'Advertisement' at the top of such content. I don't know what the situation is elsewhere.

>>...difference between await and wait...<<

After long and careful consideration I can only suggest that awaiting is
probably specific to an anticipated event or the arrival of some expected
person or thing.

Whereas one can simply wait with no specific expectation or anticipation.
But I hesitate to say that awaiting 'requires' an 'object' or that waiting can
have no object. Waiting is often an object unto itself.

One of course thinks of 'Awaiting Godot' versus 'Waiting for Godot'.
But hardly a good example since Godot is such a nonspecific thing.


~jwf~

~jwf~, such piffle is unworthy of you.

Godot, however conceptually dubious or dramatically disappointing, is grammatically a perfectly satisfactory object.

Why would you hesitate to say that awaiting requires an object or that waiting can
have no object?

That's just the way it is. Surely this much we can agree on, with or without 'scare-quotes' of mysterious 'significance'?

One can wait with no intended purpose or reason.
But we do not await without purpose or reason.

If there is a purpose or reason for waiting it requires a preposition.

EXAMPLES
I wait FOR a train.
I wait FOR Armageddon.
I wait FOR you to reply.
We are waiting FOR Godot.
I am waiting ON a friend.

This means the thing waited for is (grammatically) the object of the preposition.
And logically, it is also the object (purpose of, reason for) of the waiting.

Of course we can wait without a purpose or anticipated result.
In which case their is no preposition. We simply wait. And wait.

But cannot say await without purpose or reason.
When we say we are awaiting it suggests (presumes) some expected event.
And it requires no preposition to make that event the object of our awaiting.

EXAMPLES
I await Armageddon. I wait FOR Armageddon.
I wait FOR a train. I await the train's arrival.
I await your reply. I wait FOR you to reply.
We await Godot. We are waiting FOR Godot.

(Sorry for the CAPS but inverted commas seems to have given the wrong impression.)


~jwf~

Hi ~jwf~ perhaps you missed Recumbentman's post 16026. He says the same as you in different words.

Now you've both made me forget what I was going to ask.

Except for a further grump about emphasis moving in spoken words when I'm not looking. The latest one I have noticed is COMmunal, where I always knew it as com-MEW -nal.

And yet they have always been COMmunists . . .

A good case has been made for KIL-ometre against the increasingly common kil-O-metre:

Metrical measurements are multiples and divisions of metres (MEET-ers); and we don't say cent-I-metre (that's a capital i, not an L).

Things ending in O-meter are not measurements, but measuring devices -- mileometer, gasometer and so on.

>> mileometer <<

Curiously this term was never popular in North America.
We always called them odometers (od-DOM-itters) in Canada.

Made it easier when we switched to metric and had to convert
everything from miles to kilometers. The measuring device could
still be called an odometer. A kil-OM-itter-(O)-meter would have
been more than the average brain could handle.

>>
o·dom·e·ter
[oh-dom-i-ter]
–noun
an instrument for measuring distance traveled, as by an automobile.
Origin:
1785–95, Americanism ; var. of hodometer < Gk hodó ( s ) way + -meter
>>

That same entry from dictdotcom says 'mileometer' was also used
but my experience was that those who might have were considered
uninformed or unknowledgable about automobiles, like women drivers
and kids...


Oh, and sorry about going on about wait and await. R-man got me all
confused with his trannies and intrannies. I just wanted to make sure
we all understood about the need for a preposition after wait.


~jwf~

So what do you call it in Ireland, Recumbentman?

I call the measuring gadget a mile-OM-itter, and pronounce the unit of distance both ways, depending on nothing in particular, other than which comes out when I go to say the word.

Odometer doesn't always come to mind so Mileometer usually does, but what's wrong with Kilometre-itter?

Klicometer would work?

t.