American English Official Grammar Reference Book

[John Dunn]

I would be surprised if Du Maurier intended 'different to' to be perceived as sub-standard, especially given the relationship between social class and standardisation that then pertained (as in present-day Ambridge* only the lower orders spoke funny).  For what it's worth, I suspect that the use of 'different to' is probably more widely accepted than Will Ryan suggests and that the meticulous use of 'different from' is, like a rigorous observance of the difference between 'due to' and 'owing to' and the use of words like 'pertain', increasingly confined to formal academic writing.

Going back to Paul Gallagher's question about the bartleby.com site, I looked at some entries, and while I found it mildly prescriptive (in that it did give some fairly tentative recommendations), it was not particularly authoritative and certainly not official; it was also clearly aimed at native speakers, and while this is only of minor importance, the comments on British usage were not always reliable.

John Dunn.

*Note for non-British readers: the location of a well-known BBC radio soap opera.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Deborah Hoffman <lino59 at AMERITECH.NET>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2007 13:10:29 -0800
Subject: [SEELANGS] American English Official Grammar Reference Book

That's so interesting. The British usage of "different to" had been seared into my brain as "proper" by many tedious high school English discussions of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca with its leitmotif "She's so different to Rebecca" spoken by representatives of the upper classes. Now I'm wondering if the author intended us to glean that those speakers were in fact speaking sub-standardly, or whether this usage has changed since the 1930s.
   
 
John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

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e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
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