Comment by ggchappell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ggchappell | Hacker News Reader

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Okay, waaaaay off topic (but still from the article!):

> Low-income families are often led by single mothers, which has been found to affect boys differently than girls.

"Differently than"? This is the New York Times. I expect better. (For those who don't get it, the snooty among us prefer "differently from".)

A quick search shows any number of occurrences of this jarring bit of word choice in the NY Times of late: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+%22different+th...

So, does this mean that "different than" is officially legal in the NYT? Or does it mean that the bean counters & cost cutters at a once great paper have fired everyone who cares about grammar & usage?

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EDIT. It appears that, officially, they frown just a bit on "different than", but it isn't really a stern frown.

From The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, 1999, page 107:

> different. To satisfy the most exacting readers, use different with from, in front of a noun: Newspaper writing is different from poetry. When different unavoidably figures in a comparison with a full clause (including its own verb), different than is accepted by many authorities: Newspaper writing is different than it was 25 years ago. But if a graceful change can convert the phrasing to allow different from, it should be made: Newspaper writing is different from what it was 25 years ago.

Google Books link: https://books.google.com/books?id=CnwIVkAQgFwC&q=different+t...

In this case "than" seems correct because it's short for "affect boys differently than [it affects] girls", right?

In order to re-order that to use "from" you'd have to do something like "... the effect of which upon boys has been found to be different from that upon girls."

That's the way I read it also. Omitting words in a parallel structure like this is a form of "elliptical construction" -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)

Interesting point.

So you're saying that "girls" is not really being used as a noun phrase, but rather as an abbreviated clause. Thus we use the conjunction "than", while we would use the preposition "from" with a real honest-to-goodness noun phrase.

"Than" is a preposition, too, but only when referencing a comparative. So, "A cow has more than one stomach." But, "Cows are different from people." OTOH, I guess you would prefer, "Cows eat different food than people," (?) since "people" in that sentence is really short for "people eat".

I'll have to ponder this. Thanks for a thought-provoking comment.

EDIT. And perhaps the source of all the actually poor uses of "different than", is that many people mentally classify "different" as a comparative.

That's the least of that sentence's problems. A more egregious issue is the ambiguous antecedent. What has been found to affect boys differently? Low-income families, single mothers, being raised by single mothers?

It verges on illiterate.

Good point. As others have noted, the use of "than" might not be a problem at all. But the issue you bring up certainly is.

EDIT. If you look carefully, you can see that the sentence is not actually ambiguous. The word "which" is followed by a singular verb: "has". So the antecedent cannot be "families" or "mothers", which are plural; it must be the clause: "... being raised ....".

However, I still agree that the sentence should be restated. Making people think hard to figure out the antecedent of a pronoun, is hardly the way to communicate effectively.

I agree that they intend to refer to "being raised" but that's not even in the sentence. Unless I'm looking at the wrong sentence?

I think "from" vs "than" is a common difference between American and British English. I don't know about "different" vs "differently".

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