I spotted this sentence in an article in US Today: "And because his presence 'inspires people' and makes them forget about their problems for awhile."
That got me thinking about the difference between awhile and a while.
According to Dictionary.com:
The adverb awhile is spelled as a single word: After stopping in Hadley awhile, we drove to Deerfield. As the object of a preposition, the noun phrase a while is used, especially in editing wriing, but the single wordform is becoming increasingly common: We rested for a while (or awhile).
I know that lots of people think "increasingly common" is the same as "correct," but being a curmugeon, I don't agree.
