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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dayuhan who wrote (2842)	6/10/1999 11:39:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

Harbrace's suggests that the expression "different than" is accepted by many writers if it is followed by a clause. It is considered "more informal". (OOOoops-I'm still of the quotations within the period school.) Edit: Just saw that CH covers that in his post. Let me look to see if I have any other books he doesn't mention. How about THe Most Common Mistakes in English Usage? Very simply it states: ...remember that the word "from" is a prepostition, and the word "than" is a conjunction.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (2842)	6/10/1999 11:44:00 PM
From: The Philosopher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4711

I don't have the full OED, so I can't cite the 1644 usage it is reported to include for different than. New Fowler suggests the benefits in, e.g., Joyce Cary "I was a very different man in 1935 from what I was in 1916," suggesting it would improve by being recast as "than I was in 1916" or even "than in 1916." NF also offers "The American theatre, which is suffering from a different malaise than ours.." as far preferable to "which is suffering from a different malaise from that which ours is suffering from." Harpers offers "Please inform us if your address is different than it was in the past," though I would have just said "please advise us if your address has changed." I go further. I frankly prefer "her dress is different than mine" to "her dress is different from mine." Different to is primarily British, and is seldom seen in American writers. If you make a habit of reading English writers, though, you will run across it.

To: Dayuhan who wrote (2842)	6/11/1999 12:04:00 AM
From: jbe	Respond to of 4711

Steven, Christopher, penni, everyone: Different from/to/than Preliminary reaction only. Like Steven, off the top of my head I could not think right away of a circumstance in which I would want to use "different than." So, I turned to Brians" "Errors in English" (always a hoot), and got the following zippy treatment of the subject: Americans say "Scuba-diving is different from snorkeling," the British sometimes say "different to" and those who don't know any better say "different than." The only sort of sentence in which "different than" makes sense is exemplified by the following: "His nose looked different than it had before the big fight." Thus, we get the distinction between preposition and conjunction that penni referred to. But there must be more to it than that. Onwards. Joan