Than

[Dave Wilton]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On Behalf
> Of Ed Keer
> Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2004 6:46 AM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Than
>
>
> Does anyone find this sentence grammatical?
>
> 1) She's the one than whom I am better.
>
> It sounds like ass to me. But Barbara Wallraff at the
> The Atlantic Monthly seems to think it's grammatical.
> She uses it as evidence that "than" is both a
> preposition and a conjunction in her November column.

This is a near perfect example of the prescriptivist fallacy, that rules
govern language rather than describe it. A sentence is not grammatical
because it comports to a set of rules set down in a manual or logically
derived from other rules (as opposed to derived directly from examples).
Rather a sentence is grammatical because it comports with the way that
people use the language.

You would never hear someone use this construction and it takes a native
English speaker a minute or two to parse it and determine what the intended
meaning is. It is a most unnatural construction. A real English speaker
would say "She is the one who I am better than." Or better, albeit with a
slight change in emphasis, "I'm better than her."

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net
  http://www.wilton.net