What has castrated rain to do with writing? Maybe it's feeling a bit sheepish or just undecide. This is an example of what wrong spelling can do to a sentence. And read me, it is not always your spelling that leads you astray. Your spellchecker program can do it to you just as well or even better and with much more conviction. Join me in the rain to look at some undecided sheep.
I was given a sentence by which to remember three obnoxiously similar words. Maybe you want to learn it too. 'I wonder whether the wether will weather the weather or whether the weather the wether will kill.' And yes, my spell-checker doesn't recognize the word wether and highlights it. Lets start with that word, then. The Oxford Dictionary tells us that a wether is a castrated ram. The word is Germanic in origin and is related to the Dutch weer and the German Widder. You might not have much use for it in your writing, but keep an eye out for it to stay out of your writing when you don't deal with sheep farming.
My spell checker gives me weather as a first choice for correct spelling for wether, and whether as the second choice. Lets get out into the rain first. Weather is what happens outside in form of wind, rain, sunshine, temperature and what not. If you look at how you use weather in daily use, you will notice that you tend to use it in a negative connotation. You find a sunny day waiting for you, but the weather makes you stay inside when it rains. You also take shelter from the weather. And the weathered side of your house is where the wind and rain come from.
Weather can be a verb, too. Changing the appearance, skin can weather as much as the façade of a house. And we all know that rocks can weather away, not to mention hills or mountains. A ship (and a wether) can weather a storm and the economy can weather a recession. But maybe we shouldn't make heavy weather of all this or we might start feeling under the weather.
That leaves us with the word whether. It expresses a doubt or gives a choice between alternatives. The easy definition is that you can use it much like if but its use is more formal than if. That works quite well, but you can make more of whether when writing. A speaker's use of whether as opposed to if can show a reduced interest in the topic under discussion. An example seems in order for that one.
If I am going to the garden party in the afternoon, I would say 'I wonder if it will rain?' because I will have to decide what to wear. If my neighbors are going there and I declined to accompany them, I would say 'I wonder whether it will rain?' because it is only of mild interest to me. Is it more formal? Maybe it is. Maybe it is more formal because I ask while being civil but not really interested.
Where does this leave us? If it went after the spellchecker, castrated rams would be extinct and weather would have the ability to take shelter. Check your spellchecker, or you might end up producing abstract poetry without wanting to. You could look rather sheepish if that happened.
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