I never understood the animosity directed by prescriptivists toward different than. For some reason there are pages with titles like “Never do this: ‘different than’“. Man, so if you’re willing to come down so harshly on a construction, you’ve got to have an air-tight argument against it, right? Well, not so much. The standard argument against different than is that different from makes a lot more sense by analogy to differs from (not *differs than). But that’s just plain silly.
First off, different isn’t derived from differ, as prescriptivists often imply, or even occasionally outright state. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, different comes from the Latin present participle of different-em, via French. Differ also comes from Latin, but from the verb differ-re. Now, in Latin, different-em was the present participle of differ-re, but that’s two languages removed from our own. So it’s simply sloppy research to claim/imply that different is derived from differ. Since they were different words when they arrived in English, there’s no reason why they need to use the same particle, from. And arguing that English grammar should be based on Latin grammar led to such idiotic edicts as “don’t split infinitives“, so don’t even try arguing that a Latin relationship is relevant here.
Alternately, it has been argued that because differs (from) and is different (from) are semantically equivalent, they must take the same preposition. But why would semantically equivalent phrases require the same preposition if they’re allowed to differ in the number of words and parts of speech they employ? And anyways, this isn’t the case for prefer and have a preference for:
(1a) I prefer candy to vitamins.
(1b) I have a preference for candy over vitamins.
In (1a), there must be no preposition between prefer and candy, while in (1b), there must be one (although it could probably be something other than for). Furthermore, there’re phrases similar to differ/is different that use other prepositions but have (at least approximate) truth-conditional equivalence:
(2a) His stuffed animal is dissimilar to mine.
(2b) His stuffed animal is not the same as mine.
So it doesn’t seem that semantic near-equivalence or similarity of form requires matching prepositions.
Finally, there’s the argument that than is “the conjunctive particle used after a comparative adjective or adverb” (OED, 1a), as in more than or grouchier than. Since different is not a comparative adjective, than can’t be used, the argument concludes. Ta da! Alas, this is only one function of than; you’ll note that it also follows certain non-comparatives: rather than, other than. Rather and other instead set up an opposition between two objects or sets. This, to my mind, is similar to what different does.
So what’s the big deal here? There’s no reason to mandate from on an analogy to differ. (By the way, that’s not the way analogy normally works in linguistics. Analogy usually is used to explain a novel form, such as the regularization of a verbal paradigm, not to justify the incorrectness of an existing form.) And than’s not a bad fit here. Plus, different than has a usage that different from just can’t do:
(3a) The texture of fried jellyfish was different than/*from I’d expected.
(3b) The texture of fried jellyfish was different than/from what I’d expected.
(If you’re interested in more in-depth information about the status and usage of the different different prepositions, check out pages 341-343 of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary to English Usage.) So let’s stop deriding different than; it’s valid, it’s useful, and it’s natural.
Summary: The arguments against different than just don’t hold water. Different isn’t derived from differ, so it doesn’t require from by that argument. Semantically similar phrases don’t require the same prepositions, so that argument falls as well. And than is used in other non-comparative contexts, so it’s a reasonable particle to use there. So go ahead and use different than if you feel like it sounds better.
13 comments
Comments feed for this article
July 11, 2008 at 8:08 am
mike
>Semantically similar phrases don’t require the same prepositions
“on purpose” begets “on accident,” haha. Must be ok, right? :-)
July 11, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Gabe
Exactly. I don’t use “on accident” myself, but I kind of like the symmetry it creates. Again, that’s a novel form appearing by analogy — the way analogy normally works — rather than being shunned because of it.
July 16, 2008 at 9:56 am
goofy
I infer from MWDEU that “different than” is older than “different from”, so the argument that colloquial speech has made it sound acceptable (from your first link) also doesn’t work.
July 18, 2008 at 11:00 am
Gabe
Yep, and in almost all of these constructions with one or two set prepositions, it almost always turns out that originally, a smorgasbord of prepositions was used. The first citation in the OED for “different” has “different unto”, from 1526. They’ve also got “to” (which is still popular in British English), “than”, “from”, “then”, “against”, and “with”.
July 20, 2008 at 3:57 pm
The Ridger
“Different than” is older than “different from”, in fact. And then there’s “different to”, which is very British.
I’d point out, too, that there are in fact people who say “X differs than Y” so that argument fails.
As with many things, there are – as you say – more than one way to say it.
August 3, 2008 at 3:16 pm
nuhfaughFab
Tahnks for posting
September 2, 2008 at 11:48 pm
miamidot
Someone “pro-different than” please answer this question at
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080902023524AAaFhpm&r=w
In a nutshell,
the question posits that these words are in a similar group:
different
separate
chosen
segregated
The question asks, if you are bold enough to use
“different than” in a non-comparative way,
then …
why are you not bold enough to use
“separate than” rather than “separate from”
“chosen than” rather than “chosen from”
“segregated than” rather than “segregated from”
?
You would say
“Humans are a separate species from other animals.”
“She was chosen from among the students.”
“Women are forbidden from driving in Saudi Arabia.”
But, you not bold enough to say,
“Humans are a separate species than other animals.”
“She was chosen than among the students.”
“Women are forbidden than driving in Saudi Arabia.”
Why pick on the word “different” and refuse to give equal treatment to similar words. There is normal English and there is abnormal English.
If you wish to justify an archaic usage, than we should all sfeake and sfell Chaucerian English, to be fair.
September 2, 2008 at 11:59 pm
miamidot
I also forgot to ask,
when we say,
“She is more different from you than I thought.”
would you say,
“She is more different than you than I thought.”
?
Why all of a sudden, you “different-thanners” decide to use “different from” in this case. Why not be unwavering in your usage of “different than”?
September 3, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Gabe
I’ve been called out! Well, I don’t understand what you mean when you say that the words you’ve listed are in a ’similar group’, or as you call it on Yahoo!, of the ’same grammatical declensions’. First off, ‘discriminated from’ sounds weird to me, and Google agrees. There are 180K hits for ‘discriminated from’ as opposed to 3M for ‘discriminated against’. Even ‘discriminated by’, which sounds abysmal to me, gets more hits (200K) than ‘discriminated from’.
Secondly, as I mentioned in the post, even if the group you describe has similarities in meaning or usage, that doesn’t require adjectives to use the same prepositions.
Thirdly, ‘different than’ is not an archaic usage. It’s been used consistently for quite some time. The thing about descriptivists is that we only discuss usages that are in use. ‘Different against’ and ‘different with’ were once popular, according to the OED, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any sane person proselytizing for a conversion to one of these forms. So I’m not saying that we should use ‘different than’ because it was used in Chaucer’s day, but rather saying that there’s nothing wrong with it since it’s been in use since at least 1644 (OED). Similarly, the reason I’m not supporting or opposing ‘chosen than’ is that no one ever says it, so there’s no reason to argue for or against it.
Finally, it’s clear that ‘different than’ can’t be used in the sentence you cite, but similarly, ‘different from’ can’t be used in (3a); we ‘different-thanners’ aren’t the only one lacking courage in our convictions. If we’re going to throw ‘different than’ out because it can’t be used in one environment, then we have to throw out ‘different from’, too, and then we can’t say anything.
September 7, 2008 at 6:11 am
frank burns
Oh sure, that is a good rule, just use what sounds “better” to you. Realize, however, that if it sounds ignorant to others, then you will be so judged. Of course they themselves might be very ignorant for judging like that, but… well, don’t blame me, cuz I didn’t make the rules of life!
September 8, 2008 at 8:31 am
Gabe
Frank: Well, that’s the way that grammar works; there’s nothing wrong with ‘different than’ or ‘different from’, so you get to pick which one to use based on how it sounds to you.
October 15, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Rob
I’ve always thought of the meaning of difference in terms of a kind of spatial relationship. I imagine two things differing, and as they differ, they differ “away from” each other. They don’t differ towards each other, they don’t differ in whatever way a “-than” relationship would suggest, they differ (away) from each other. If X and Y are identical, and then Y takes on some new property, i see Y moving away from X in terms of similarity/difference. Thus, Y is now different from X. In my head, talking about two things being different, is talking about the ways in which they part, or move away, from each other.
I guess i just can’t help using a spatial image-schema when i think of the semantics of “different”. Maybe doing so is a mistake, i don’t know, but that’s what I’ve always thought about this whole different from/to/than debate.
March 5, 2009 at 3:45 pm
mollymooly
In fact, “rather” is in origin the comparative of the obsolete adverb “rathe”. “I’d rather” is syntactically parallel to “I would sooner” or “I had better”.
Not that this invalidates your point.