When and however you choose to use "whenever" is likely influenced by where you're from. It's no wonder that whenever you hear somebody use it in an unfamiliar way, it sounds, well, odd.
Our listener Abigail Doyle recently encountered a use that she's not accustomed to hearing.
"Would 'Whenever I was a kid, I liked swinging on the swings' be an appropriate/grammatically correct sentence?" she asked. "It sounds so wrong to me. It seems like it should be something like 'When I was a kid, I’d feel joy whenever I was on the swing set' instead."
Whether it's grammatically correct depends on which variety of English you speak. It's actually part of the grammar in some varieties of English.
One way that you're probably used to using "whatever" is to refer to recurring events, where "whenever" means something like "every time that [something happens]" or "any time that [something happens]." For example, "Whenever I come over, my friend bakes cookies." You can also use "whenever" conditionally: "Whenever you get home, I'll bake you some cookies."
There's a third use called "punctual whenever," where "whenever" means either "when" or "as soon as." The Oxford English Dictionary puts this use back to 1655, and cites this example from The Comical History of Francion: "He gave me a good supper last night, whenever I came within his doors." In other words, as soon as you came in the door, you got dinner.
Much of the information Professor Anne Curzan found on this particular use came from a 2001 article by linguists John M. Kirk and Michael B. Montgomery titled "My Mother, Whenever She Passed Away, She had Pneumonia." The "whenever" used in this title means "as soon as" or "the time when."
This construction is found in the north of Ireland and Scotland. It's also found in the American midland and south, including Appalachia and western Pennsylvania. Kirk and Montgomery suggest that this construction probably traveled to the US with Scots-Irish immigrants in the 18th century, along with things like double modals such as "might could" or "might should."
The "whenever" that our listener asked about is called "extended time whenever." It goes back to at least the early 1900s in Ireland, so Kirk and Montgomery suggest that it may also have come to the US via Scots-Irish immigrants. In their article, they include examples like, "Whenever I was growing up, we didn't talk the same way at school as we did at home."
To hear more of our conversation on "whenever," you can listen to the audio above, whenever.
