10:35am Friday 19th March 2010
A good friend has berated me for writing in this column ‘different to’ instead of ‘different from’. As one who regularly criticises the verbal infelicities of others, I confess that I was mortified to have been identified as a preposition abuser.
Before apologising to the nation, I decided to double check. To my surprise, and slight relief, I learned that I may not be entirely without justification in using this form.
One of the greatest published authorities on the English language, H W Fowler says: “That ‘different’ can only be followed by ‘from’ and not by ‘to’ is a superstition.’
But I must concede that most other publications opt for ‘from’ as the preferred form, whilst acknowledging that ‘to’ is just about acceptable and in most circumstances preferable to the even less favoured ‘than’.
I can sense some people reading this and thinking ‘Who the heck cares? As long as we understand each other, then why should it matter?
Language is constantly changing, so let’s just go with the flow.” They have a point, of course; but do we really want to end up with everyone writing in text speak, or ‘txt spk’? Am I just being an old linguistic Luddite, when I shudder on receiving a text inviting me to join someone for a drink after the show – “C U @ pub l8r 2nite”?
My only consolation in this case is that this form of communication will die out instantly when more sophisticated voice recognition software is available for phones in the very near future.
To be fair, it is not just laziness that drives this mangled brief-speak, it is the fact that it reduces messages in size and therefore cost. I am not a great user of text myself, preferring the email, but in both cases I cannot bring myself to do other than laboriously type the whole thing out with my far from flying forefinger. In that way, I am different FROM my children, who use their mobile phones with the same speed and casual dexterity as those demonstrators employed in shops to sell wonder kitchen utensils that can skin a grape, fillet a haddock or cut a coconut into thin strips in microseconds.
Then, when you get it home it takes you weeks to learn how to peel a potato with it at half the speed that you could before you were bamboozled into buying the wretched thing.
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