Conjunctions like “than” are better suited to introducing whole clauses rather than nouns and pronouns. Much of the opposition to “different than” is rooted in the idea that “than” is first and foremost a conjunction. So if you want a usage that’s considered acceptable by people who believe this, you should avoid “different than” and instead use “different from.”īut what if you’re only concerned with those other types, people who get their facts straight? Well, then you have a little more flexibility. “A grammatical blunder.” “Endlessly annoying.” “Hurts my ears.” These are just a few of the rants against “different than” turned up by a recent Google search. Misinformed sticklers - and there are a lot of them out there - do not consider “different than” to be acceptable. Which, of course, raises the most important question: considered acceptable. But he was even smarter in how he worded his question: Is “different than” considered acceptable? Because when a dictionary definition leaves you some wiggle room on a usage, the matter becomes a question of whether it’s considered acceptable. “Your example of prepositions following ‘different,’ however, didn’t address the locution that I see most frequently, ‘different than,’ which usually sounds strange to me, but my dictionary says that ‘than’ has been used as a preposition since 1560 to mean ‘in comparison with.’ So is ‘different than’ considered acceptable?”įred was smart to start with the dictionary, that’s where most answers of this nature lie. “I read your interesting discussion of the impact of idiom on grammar in the Glendale News-Press today,” wrote Fred in Glendale. In the process, I avoided mention of the more common issue: “different than.” I simply didn’t have the ink, and I hoped no one would notice. Not long ago this column examined the phrase “different to.” A reader who had heard the term in a TV commercial wanted to know: Shouldn’t it be “different from”? I spent the following 500 words discussing how preposition choices are a matter of idiom - standard usage - before concluding that “different from” sure sounds better to me.
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