Different Rant

Example of perfectly acceptable uses of the words ‘than’ and ‘from’.

My November Day Thirteen, and a Friday to boot.

And now for something completely different….

There is a ban

On ‘different than’

I learned that little rhyme in grade school and have never forgotten it.  When people use those two words together it sounds like lazy grammar and just grates on my nerves.  I want to correct them.  It’s ‘different from’.

Different FROM everybody!  Don’t be dumb, say different from.  That one I made up on my own.

I know both phrases are now acceptable, and maybe they were when I was taught that they weren’t, but it’s a good rule and I like it and it bugs me when it’s broken.  So stop saying it and writing it and thinking it in your head, okay?

Here is a convincing little blurb from my on-line dictionary.  Yes, I am still reading the dictionary.  I even downloaded the premier edition.  Is it geek week?

In formal writing, different from is generally preferred to different than. This preference has to do, in part, with the historical use of the word than. This term entered English as a conjunction often used with comparative adjectives, such as better, taller, shorter, warmer, lesser, and more, to introduce the second element in a comparison. Different is not a comparative adjective. Thus, when different than first started appearing in English, it sounded grating or less natural to discerning ears.

They are talking about my ears, attached to my anal brain.  This is almost as bad as mixing up YOUR and YOU’RE.  Almost.  Please tell me you’re not making this faux pas with your words.

I also read that in the UK it’s common to say ‘different to’.  Is that true?  It sounds backwards.  Although preferable to ‘than’.

The only instance in which different should be used with than is when you say something like

This house is different than I remember.

But you could also say

This house is different from what I remember.

Or you could simply pretend you don’t remember a damned thing about the house and shut up about it already.

I don’t usually rant on a Friday the 13th, or any other day really.  I have no idea from whence all this came.  Be thankful you aren’t having coffee with me and listening to this rather meaningless grammar lesson in real life.

Happy Friday everybody!

I think I will now get myself out of the house and into some fresh air, so tomorrow’s post will be pleasantly different FROM this one.

Sharing My World 24

Mother Natures April Fools Day Humour

Share Your World – 2015 Week #13

What was your favorite subject in school?

Language Arts, or whatever name it goes by now.  Back in the dark ages when I went to school this subject was called English and broken down into reading, spelling, grammar and composition.  I loved them all.  Although my spelling wasn’t one of my highest priorities and as a result there are still words I don’t like to spell correctly the first time.  Spell check makes me doubly lazy.  Plus it also appears to have a sense of humour with its sometimes bizarre suggestions.

Both my parents were sticklers for excellent grammar so we learned to say things properly to avoid having them constantly correct us.  They both instilled a love of reading in us, by reading to us until we could read for ourselves.   Do kids still have to parse a sentence and identify all the parts of speech?  One underline for subject, double underline for verb, triple for object, adjectives and adverbs and phrases in brackets with arrows to what they modify.  Then name the conjunctions, pronouns, prepositions, etc.   I love all those rules which I often delight in breaking with run-on or incomplete sentences and dangling participles and orphan which clauses.  Excellent grammar can sometimes sound very snobbish, so usually I write the way I talk and break many of the rules.  Just so you know it’s (mostly) on purpose.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths you take,  but by the moments that take your breath away” (George Carlin).  When have you had such a moment?

At the births of my children (after all that heavy breathing) and when seeing each one of my grandchildren for the first time.  There’s something about a newborn baby or a baby of any age that melts my heart.  I look at those perfect little faces and forget to breathe.

There was also that time in Scotland when we got off the bus at Glencoe and looking at those noble green hills gave me the weirdest sensation of deja vu.  Maybe I was a Highland warrior in a previous life, or lost loved ones in the massacre of 1692.  It’s also possible, (because of my retracted ear drum which I believed at the time was caused from the stuffiness of a head cold),  that I was simply high on decongestants.

What’s your choice: jigsaw,  crossword,  or numeric puzzles?

I’ve been seriously addicted to all three, but thankfully not all at once.  My various obsessions last until I get bored or realize I’m wasting an incredible amount of time that could be better spent, and then I move on to a new addiction and repeat the process.  My choice at the moment would be crosswords of medium difficulty.  The really hard ones make me feel stupid.  And nobody likes that.

If you found an obviously abandoned car with $50,000 in the back seat, what would you do?

If I knew for certain that I would never get caught, I would take the money home with me and hide it under my mattress.  Because you don’t want to create suspicion by suddenly depositing a lot of cash in the bank.  And then I would have to pray that the house didn’t burn down.  But who is EVER certain of not being found out?  And if we’re not called on something, we eventually blurt out the truth on our own because the burden of keeping a secret drives us nuts.

So I would call the police.  Because it’s the right thing to do.  And I’m rather boring like that.

The grateful for and looking forward to part….

Late yesterday afternoon we had a delightful rain with thunder and everything.  Then over night the rain turned to blowing snow.  It looks like January out there.  So I’m grateful to be inside where it’s warm and not out driving anywhere in this.

I’m looking forward to finishing the reading of a book.  ANY book.  Amazon keeps sending me e-mails asking me to rate the books I’ve purchased and I haven’t read them yet!  I get annoyed with the emails because I’m annoyed with myself.  And I’m also annoyed that when I start reading where I left off I have no idea what’s going on and have to backtrack a few pages to figure it out.  So lately it’s two pages back, three forward, and then I fall asleep.  I’m grateful there is nothing more serious to be annoyed about.

It’s too cold and blustery to go for a walk and search for abandoned cars full of cash, so I’ll just curl up on my couch and play word games instead.  In no time at all I will find myself gasping at my own breath-taking brilliance!  HAHA!  Mother Nature is not the only one who does funny things.

 

My Monday

It’s best to get minor traumatic ordeals over with first thing in the morning, which is why I booked a hair appointment at 9:00 a.m. on my Monday off.  I know that’s an ‘orphan-which’ clause, but I dearly love my orphan-which clauses and don’t feel like correcting it.  One day I might be a famous author noted for just such a repeated grammatical faux pas.  In fact, maybe I’ll call my first best seller The Orphan Which.  Watch for that, and remember, you saw it here first.

Today my hair stylist pronounced herself ‘so super excited to fix this up!’ which (sorry, I’ve done it again) set off a couple of alarm bells in my head.  But there’s really no backing out once you’re sitting in that pumped up chair under the giant black cape of doom.

To soothe my frazzled nerves and quiet what’s left of my hair standing on end,  I have spent the better part of the rest of this day finishing the second book I picked up off a bargain table.  Every so often I like to read a real book, as opposed to an e-book, and these two looked like easy reading romantic novels with a bit of mystery thrown in. I was not expecting to learn all kinds of things about assisted suicide.  In not just one of the books, but in both of them.  Really, what are the odds?

Louisa Clark has been let go from the Buttered Bun Tea Shop and with very few marketable skills is desperate for a job.  Will Traynor has spent the last two years of his life as a paraplegic following a motorcycle accident, is depressed and in pain, and has lost his will to live.  His mother hires Louisa as Wills secondary caregiver, hoping to somehow add something to his life which will change his mind about his decision to end it.  Louisa isn’t initially aware of his plans, but once she finds out, she goes a little crazy doing everything she can think of to make him happy and show him that his life is still worth living.  It’s funny and heartbreaking all at once.  Any story that makes me laugh and cry is probably one of the good ones.  The outcome is never a given.  You might be surprised.

And now meet Leila, a solitary and sheltered young woman who has recently lost her mother.  She joins a chat forum and impresses the sites founder with her ethical debate, and is asked by him to become part of what he calls “Project Tess”.  Tess, a beautiful and popular woman with bipolar disorder, has decided to commit suicide but wants to pass her identity on to Leila so that it will appear to her family and friends that she has simply moved out of the country.  They e-mail, chat and Skype in preparation for Tess’s check-out day.  Leila is very opinionated, but doesn’t have a lot of people skills and constantly misinterprets events and situations after she takes over this new identity, and you begin to think that this cannot possibly end well.  And that’s why you keep reading, because you have to find out.

I love to be pleasantly surprised by books that have a lot more depth than their titles or covers seem to indicate.  I am also pleasantly surprised by this hair cut, now that I’ve had a few hours to adjust my head to its present state of lightness and air.

So, all things considered, it’s been a not too shabby day.

If You Could Read Me Now

The Daily Prompt :  Audience of One – Picture the one person in the world you really wish were reading your blog. Write her or him a letter.

AP English Books (Photo credit: Dave Kleinschmidt)

Dear Mr. Thornburn:

I don’t imagine that you will remember me, one of a thousand students you taught over your long career, so here’s a little memory jog for you.

You taught English Literature to my grade twelve class in 1966.  I was seventeen years old.  I thought at first that you were way beyond the point where it was healthy for you to still be teaching, and imagined you must be in your seventies with your bifocals and your grey hair and your vivid memories of the ancient history that happened in your lifetime before we were even born.

Once you actually called me by my mothers name because you had taught English classes to her too, and I wanted to shrink down under my seat and disappear.  No teenage girl wants anyone to think she’s anything at all like her mother.  You shook your head as if to clear it and laughed and then went on to highly praise some little thing I’d written, reading it aloud to the rest of the class and explaining exactly why it was so brilliant.

Sketch of William Shakespeare. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I was embarrassed, but I was also elated and inspired by your words.  You, lover of literature and grammar and composition, who made Shakespeare come alive for us by reciting some soliloquy on top of your desk while wielding a plastic sword – you  really liked something I’d written.  You made me want to write more.

That’s why I wish you were still around to read my blog.  It’s not Shakespeare, but it is words from my heart.  Almost always grammatically correct.  Except right there of course, since that wasn’t a real sentence, and this one is a bit of a run-on mess, but you know what I mean.  You were so enthusiastic and encouraging and supportive.  You always pointed out the good stuff.  You brought out the best in me.

You saw that spark inside me and you blew on it until it became a fire that would never burn out.  I am reading, I am writing, and I am appreciating the power of the written word. When a book or a story or even just some delightful little phrase makes me joyful, I think about how much you would have loved it.

So thank you Mr. Thornburn.  I will never be a best selling author or famous for any other reason, but that doesn’t matter.  Someone, somewhere will be inspired by some small thing I decided was important enough to write down.  I wish it could be you, because I owe you.

Yours sincerely,

Not My Mother, but finally able to see what a compliment it was to be the one who made you think of her.