Whilst is a good word when it's in an archaic context. I expect to find "whilst" in a good Lovecraft story, or in a Poe poem. I may read it out loud as "while," because my audience would jar a bit at "whilst," but when reading in private, I love it.
However, I recently read a certain RPG game book that had clearly done a search/replace for "while" to "whilst." They had not gone through to read the book for consistent usage, or for how this search/replace sounded to the ear. This was pretty much the ONLY archaicism they used, so it jumped out at me every time I came across the word.
Of course, most of these game books have many, many typos-- enough that I wonder if there's some sort of competition for the most typos in a module without making it unreadable. |
