Too much time on his hands

Re:Too much time on his hands by unwind on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @09:49AM (#1591414)

Why does a Real Author write "pass-time"? Isn't "pastime" the actual word, and "pass-time" just a weird homonym? Or is it actually "accepted" as a real word?

I realize natural languages don't have binary contains() functions for words, it's just something that I tend to stumble over as a non-native speaker.

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Re:Too much time on his hands by stan_rogers on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @12:29PM (#1592057)

Usage and spelling have regional variants, and Cory is (like myself) Canadian. We Canadians of a certain vintage (those educated before American spellings were given the nod in the Canadian Press Manual of Style) have tended to retain older spellings. "Pass-time" is among them, and it appears in Canadian writing (with or without the hyphen) far more often than the single-ess version.

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Re:Too much time on his hands by twoshortwords on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @11:49AM (#1591880)

He may be deliberately using a strange wording to point out that these activities "pass time" (and not much else). However, I agree that the wording is off. Especially considering that's what "pastime" means in the first place [1]. Paul Brians notes that "pastime" is correct, too [2].

[1]: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pastime [2]: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/pasttime.html

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Re:Too much time on his hands by nollidge on Tuesday August 10, 2010 @10:31AM (#1591540)

As a native speaker, I stumbled over it also. I've never seen it before. It may be idiosyncratic to Doctorow, but it's not in common usage.

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