Grammar Moses: What's the difference between 'from' and 'than'?

I've been troubled lately, as usually is the case when I listen to radio advertisements, about glaring word choice problems.

Often, my gripe is with the use of fuzzy math to oversell products. But sometimes I hear a word or phrase used incorrectly, and I'll hear it repeated in the next ad.

My latest earworm is substituting the correct form - "different from" - with "different than."

I already had decided to write about this for today's column when I read this headline from The Washington Post: "Kavanaugh's memory of himself in high school is very different than his portrayal in the yearbook."

Ack!

Linguist Bryan A. Garner in his "Modern American Usage" explains the difference well: "The problem is that than should follow a comparative adjective (larger than, sooner than, etc.) and different is not a comparative - though, to be sure, it is a word of contrast."

However, "different than" has its place, when different from makes for awkward construction.

"The choice between cheeseburgers and pie is often different for men than for women" is a good example of when the idiomatic expression works better.

Google's Ngram viewer, a searchable compendium of words and phrases used in books published between 1800 and 2000, is a great online tool for watching trends in word use.

I compared "different from" to "different than," and while "different than" had been on the rise since about the start of World War I, "different from" still was being used 13 times as often by 2000, the last year of the study.

Text for books, as you know, goes through a battery of editors before it goes to press. My hope is that in the 6 percent of the cases in which "different than" was employed those editors had good reason to use it.

Minus

I was banging out an editorial just before writing this and ran the spell-checker, which, to my delight, rarely points out mistakes.

But it told me the word I wrote - "miniscule" - is spelled "minuscule."

Well, I'll be. I learn something new every day.

I never gave it a lot of thought but assumed that because the word means tiny it would start with "mini-."

It comes from the Latin minuscula littera, meaning "slightly smaller letter."

Scrabble

Although I got pretty prescriptivist with you in my opening salvo on "different than," I'm here to remind you that times do change, and sometimes so do the rules.

Merriam-Webster last week released its sixth edition of "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary."

In the four years since the fifth edition was released, editors decided that "OK" was OK and "ew" was not too icky to play.

However, I think "ew" is best stretched out - ewww - for proper effect.

Something all Scrabble players can appreciate is a word that helps you if you get stuck with a Q without also having a U on your rack.

"Qapik," a unit of currency in Azerbaijan, is now among the approved words, bringing to 20 the number of U-less Q words at your disposal.

However, the word I'm most excited about is one I use almost daily. To finally legitimize it for the Scrabble board makes me scream "Yowza!"

Write carefully!

• Jim Baumann is vice president/managing editor of the Daily Herald. Write him at jbaumann@dailyherald.com. Put Grammar Moses in the subject line. You also can friend or follow Jim at facebook.com/baumannjim.