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Qua vs Which - What's the difference?

qua | which |

As an adverb qua

is as a; in the capacity of.

As a preposition qua

is in the capacity of.

As a determiner which is

what, of those mentioned or implied (used interrogatively).

As a pronoun which is

who; whom; what (of those mentioned or implied).

As a noun which is

an occurrence of the word which.

qua

English

Adverb

(-)
  • As a; in the capacity of.
  • * 1954 : , Dilemmas: The Tarner Lectures, 1953 , dilemma vii: Perception, page 99 (The Syndics of the Cambridge University Press)
  • As anatomy, physiology and, later, psychology have developed into more or less well-organized sciences, they have necessarily and rightly come to incorporate the study of, among other things, the structures, mechanisms, and functionings of animal and human bodies qua percipient.
  • * 1962 : ; Dreaming ; chapter nine: “Judgments in Sleep”, page 39{1}; chapter twelve: “The Concept of Dreaming”, page 68{2} (1977 paperback reprint; Routledge & Kegan Paul; ISBN 0?7100?3836?4 (c), 0?7100?8434?X (p))
  • {1} For sleep qua'' sleep has no experiential content: it cannot turn out, as remarked before, that a man was not asleep because he was ''not having some experience or other.
    {2} I am denying that a dream qua dream is a seeming, appearance or ‘semblance of reality’.
  • * 2003 : Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason , page 458 (Penguin, 2004)
  • It was qua poet that Byron resurrected the exploded and discarded immortal Christian soul by bodying it forth through the notion of soul conceived as poetic imagination.
  • * 2005 : Ulfelder, Jay.Collective Action and the Breakdown of Authoritarian Regimes. International Political Science Review, 26(3), p318. Retrieved 1615 240810 from http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/stable/pdfplus/30039035.pdf?acceptTC=true.
  • "In essence, military regimes are autocracies in which the military qua organization performs many of the functions performed by the ruling party in single-party regimes."
  • * 2009 : Ken Levy, Killing, Letting Die, and the Case for Mildly Punishing Bad Samaritanism , Georgia Law Review, p. 24.
  • Blame qua attitude is the feeling or belief that an individual has committed a wrongdoing, usually a wrongful action and/or harm, and can be reasonably expected not to have committed this wrongdoing. Blame qua practice is the public expression of this attitude – usually by means of censure (written or verbal criticism) or punishment. Generally, the morally worse the wrongdoing, the more severe the censure/punishment.

    Preposition

    (English prepositions)
  • in the capacity of
  • Anagrams

    * ----

    which

    English

    (wikipedia which)

    Alternative forms

    * whiche (obsolete) * wich (Jamaican English)

    Determiner

    (en determiner)
  • What, of those mentioned or implied (used interrogatively ).
  • * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-17, volume=408, issue=8849, magazine=(The Economist), author=Schumpeter
  • , title= In praise of laziness , passage=Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.}}
  • (interrogative) What one or ones (of those mentioned or implied).
  • (relative) The one or ones that.
  • (relative) The one or ones mentioned.
  • * {{quote-magazine, year=2013, month=May-June, author= Katrina G. Claw
  • , title= Rapid Evolution in Eggs and Sperm , volume=101, issue=3, magazine=(American Scientist) , passage=Many genes with reproductive roles also have antibacterial and immune functions, which indicate that the threat of microbial attack on the sperm or egg may be a major influence on rapid evolution during reproduction.}}
  • Used of people (now generally (who), (whom) or (that)).
  • * 1526 , (William Tyndale), trans. Bible , Acts IX:
  • The men which acompanyed him on his waye stode amased, for they herde a voyce, butt sawe no man.

    Pronoun

    (English Pronouns)
  • (lb) Who; whom; what (of those mentioned or implied).
  • :
  • *
  • , title=(The Celebrity), chapter=2 , passage=Sunning himself on the board steps, I saw for the first time Mr. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke.
  • *
  • *:There was a neat hat-and-umbrella stand, and the stranger's weary feet fell soft on a good, serviceable dark-red drugget, which matched in colour the flock-paper on the walls.
  • *{{quote-magazine, date=2013-07-20, volume=408, issue=8845, magazine=(The Economist)
  • , title= Welcome to the plastisphere , passage=Plastics are energy-rich substances, which is why many of them burn so readily. Any organism that could unlock and use that energy would do well in the Anthropocene. Terrestrial bacteria and fungi which can manage this trick are already familiar to experts in the field.}}

    Usage notes

    * (US usage'') Some authorities insist, prescriptively, that relative ''which'' should be used only in non-restrictive contexts. For restrictive contexts (e.g., ''The song that made the charts in 2004 is better than the later ones''), they prefer ''that''. Actual usage does not support this "rule". Fowler, who proposed the rule, himself acknowledged that it was "not the practice of most or of the best writers". Even E.B. White, a notorious "which-hunter", wrote this: "the premature expiration of a pig is, I soon discovered, a departure which the community marks solemnly on its calendar." In modern UK usage, ''The song which made the charts in 2004 is better than the later ones is generally accepted without question. * When "which" (or the other relative pronouns "who" and "that") is used as the subject of a relative clause, the verb agrees with the antecedent of the pronoun. Thus "The thing which is...", "The things which are...", etc.

    Quotations

    * 1611 — 1:1 *: Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us...

    Derived terms

    * every which way * every which where * whichever * whichness * whichsoever

    Noun

    (es)
  • An occurrence of the word which .
  • * 1959 , William Van O'Connor, Modern prose, form and style (page 251)
  • The ofs and the whiches have thrown our prose into a hundred-years' sleep.
  • * 1989 , Donald Ervin Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, Paul M. Roberts, Mathematical writing (page 90)
  • Is it not true, TLL asked of Mary-Claire, that people invariably get their whiches and thats right when they speak?