In recent years I’ve come across things like, “I’d like to buy a new TV, but I’m waiting on my tax refund.”
To me this sounds very foreign. I"m in the New York City area, and never heard it until a few years ago. Such a context would never be anything but “waiting for.”
“Waiting on” is reserved for things which a waiter or waitress does: to wait on people. That is, to serve other people, waiting for their requests and instructions and such.
As I think about it now, I suppose it could be neatly divided like this: “Waiting on” is a service one actively performs for other people. “Waiting for” is simply a condition of killing time and waiting for some event to occur.
Does this make sense to others? Was the extended use of “waiting on” a regional thing which has recently expanded into other areas? Or maybe it was never used anywhere to refer to events, but recently took that meaning everywhere? Or maybe it has always been used that way even in NYC and I never noticed?
I agree with the OP. “Waiting on” is unfortunately extremely prevalent. Even at my job (software), where we create various messages such as “waiting (on/for) XYZ”, they are creating messages with “waiting on”. I pointed out that they should be “waiting for” but they decided to leave it as “on”. The messages were reviewed by the proofreaders and left that way. Personally I would be embarrassed to say “waiting on” in a business context. It has always sounded like dialect to me.
I’ve encountered ‘waiting on’ here in the UK - in the south where I live, it tends to feel rather archaic, but I think it becomes more and more the norm the further north you go.
It is dialect. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. For business/technical writing you can certainly dictate the style you want to use, but for colloquial usage there’s not a thing wrong with it. Unlike the OP I have heard this for most of my life and it sounds perfectly natural to me.
I remember reading about “waiting on and waiting for” in William Safire’s column ‘On Language’ in the New York Times years ago. I think he said it has its origins in the phrase “waiting en queue”, which turned into “waiting on line”. The column is reprinted in Let A Simile Be Your Umbrella. Search was not available for this book either in Amazon or Google books unfortunately.
I agree, “waiting on” to mean “waiting for” has really taken over the NYC area in the past 5 years. Before that I thought of it as a Southern US dialectical expression, noteworthy when I heard it, as if I were to say I was “waiting on” someone it would suggest standing with a notepad and asking if they wanted a lemon slice with their Diet Coke.
Then I started hearing it from a lot of people, and finally, within the past 5 years, it’s the standard phrase around my office (to “wait on” developments, people’s responses, etc.). It used to bug me but I’ve gotten over it.
“Waiting on” is extremely prevalent in Ireland. My grandparents would have said “waiting on” instead of “waiting for”, although my parents (both teachers) would not. I remember being specifically taught at school the “correct” (i.e. standard English) usage.
My sister, raised in Massachusetts, moved to Tennessee years ago. She worked as a waitress and one night a young guy started getting friendly and asked if she wanted him to wait on her. She thought it was a joke, the customer asking to wait on the waitress. But when she quit for the evening, he was waiting FOR her, outside (she politely turned him down).
I can remember back in the fifth grade Miss Sullivan telling the class that one should never say “wait on” when “wait for” is meant, that it would be a sign of poor language skills. And I can remember thinking "That’s stupid. Who would ever say “wait on?” This was in 1948 in Massachusetts. It wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina in 1961 that I actually heard someone say “wait on” meaning “wait for.” Now, I hear it all the time, in person and on radio/tv, and even see it in print , in newspapers and books. It still causes me to wince.
As someone who used to be a waitress and bartender, I spent a good deal of time “waiting on” people. But when they were being slow to order, I was definitely “waiting for” them to order.
