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RANT: THEN VS. THAN

Started 3 years ago by flipjack
Latest reply from jkboison

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flipjack
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I keep seeing supposedly literate people, (journalists even!) using \"then\" when they should be using \"than\". It really bugs the hell out of me!!!

Rule of thumb:
THEN: connotes TIME
THAN: connotes COMPARISON
SO if you want to compare something then use the right word!

THAN
1 a-- used as a function word to indicate the second member or the member taken as the point of departure in a comparison expressive of inequality -- used with comparative adjectives and comparative adverbs (older than I am) (easier said than done) b-- used as a function word to indicate difference of kind, manner, or identity -- used especially with some adjectives and adverbs that express diversity (anywhere else than at home)

THEN
1: at that time
2a: soon after that : next in order of time (walked to the door, then turned) b: following next after in order of position, narration, or enumeration : being next in a series (first came the clowns, then came the elephants) c: in addition : besides (then there is the interest to be paid)
3a (1): in that case (take it, then, if you want it so much) (2)-- used after but to qualify or offset a preceding statement (she lost the race, but then she never really expected to win) b: according to that : as may be inferred (your mind is made up, then) c: as it appears : by way of summing up d: as a necessary consequence (if the angles are equal, then the complements are equal)

Posted 3 years ago #
WSB
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I love word rants. Could do an entire website about them. I had an entire website about typos once upon a time, and one that still makes me cringe:

sneak peak

No, it\'s sneak PEEK. Unless you are discussing mountains.

Posted 3 years ago #
Magpie
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Personally, my favorite misword is reconize...drives me CRAZY!!!!

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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my boss mixes up sell and sale i just got an email telling us to sale sale sale next week rather than sell sell sell! it kills me and i dont want to be the one to correct her shes my boss and i love her!!

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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my all time favorite is Nordstroms. IT IS Nordstrom no s. that one makes me crazy!!!

Posted 3 years ago #
JanS
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oh, I\'m anal about this. I\'ll forgive typos, but..their, there, and they\'re...people should learn the difference.

I read professional websites that use these words incorrectly all the time. Spell check won\'t catch it, because the words are spelled right, just used wrongly. It really reflects on the website, and not in a good way.

HP..yes...my daughter works at Nordstrom...took me a while to learn to leave the \"s\" off :)

Posted 3 years ago #
JoB
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Ms Evans, my fourth grade teacher is tossing in her grave at the very idea that it would be a rant to expect proper use of the english language.

she said you are either literate or you\'re not..

i am sure flipjack has caught me wrong worded more than once... unfortunately my swiss cheese brain makes me sound and look illiterate some days:(

but i cringe every time my nephew writes. He is intelligent, imaginative, insightful and illiterate... as are the majority of those i correspond with.

Posted 3 years ago #
mellaw6565
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As a teacher of grammar and language arts, I see a ton of mis-usage and mis-spelling. Some of them are quite funny. I had one student from Asia who couldn\'t wrap his head around \"housewife\" - he always thought is was \"wifehouse\". (Of course easily done when converting native language to English).

I also had a student ask to have another student \"circumcised\" instead of \"chastised\".

One of my pet peeves is people who say \"revelant\" instead of \"relevant\".

Posted 3 years ago #
JoB
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LOL..

i would far rather be chastised than circumcised:)

Posted 3 years ago #
mellaw6565
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I also love malaproprisms - one of my favorites is from the old Mayor Daley in Chicago:

\"I resent that insinuendo\".

Posted 3 years ago #
JoB
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thanks for this thread.. i needed intelligent conversation and good giggle before i turned in.

i hate to go to bed angry:)

Posted 3 years ago #
acemotel
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This one (a misspelling) makes me crazy and I see it every day: definately

Posted 3 years ago #
mellaw6565
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Ace - I also see \"seperately\"

Posted 3 years ago #
WSB
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Oh, I\'ll throw in a kudo here that I haven\'t had another chance to mention.

A local business had its front window painted recently. We drive by said window all the time. We did horrified double-takes as we saw the painter completing the job with one of the words spelled this way:

REJUVINATE

I have come to expect so little from the grammar/spelling deficiencies of this time in history, that I fully expected it to remain that way.

But no - within a few days it had been fixed to REJUVENATE. Bravo.

Posted 3 years ago #
KatherineL
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Oooh, what a great thread! This kind of misusage drives me nuts, but I\'m willing to overlook a lot in casual email. People are in a hurry, people make typos, they don\'t reread their message before sending. What really gripes me is published books with this kind of mistake. Don\'t they have copy editors anymore? One of the most frequent I see is scholars who pour over old books.

Posted 3 years ago #
AdmiralJaneway
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For some reason, I\'ve always tacked on an \"s\" to the names of department stores - Penney\'s, Frederick & Nelson\'s, and Nordstrom\'s. The possessive form just sounds right.

A high school teacher tells me that text messaging and spell check are creating a generation of poor spellers. Kids don\'t make the effort to spell correctly. I wonder how often they pick up a dictionary to check the spelling of a word.

Posted 3 years ago #
JoB
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at some point, it seems people just stopped thinking it was important...

Posted 3 years ago #
Bonnie
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I have a friend who used to get the word meet mixed up with meat. Good grief!

Posted 3 years ago #
meg
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I am embarrassed to admit that I am so exhausted lately that instead of typing \"once this is over,\" I typed \"wants this over\". I need sleep!

Posted 3 years ago #
Magpie
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And let\'s not forget our illustrious president and his use of nucular and nuclear (oops, I mean misuse)..He has butchered the English language so much that an entire industry has popped up around it and a new word was created, \"Bushism\". I don\'t think he has a pitcher of Putin up, either.

Posted 3 years ago #
add
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One of my pet peeves is when people put an apostrophe-s (\'s) when making a word plural. Drives me crazy - especially on professional literature, websites, etc.!!!

Posted 3 years ago #
Magpie
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The good news is that spelling, grammar and intellect don\'t correlate. That is, except for our president.

Posted 3 years ago #
RonM
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I\'ve been a bad speller all of my life. When a child I had the back of my knuckles whacked with a ruler, was called lazy and ignorant by teachers I would otherwise have admired. I had to take a spelling tutoring class in collage and in the end it didnâ€™t help. I carried a pocket dictionary with me most of time. A word may be spelled a dozen different ways on a page and they all look the same to me. I can recognize a difference only if I consciously compare them letter by letter. It wasn\'t until I was about 50 when I learned there was a name for it, dyslexia!

Thank god for spell checkers, but they are not perfect. What has been irritating me more recently are those who write as though they were texting on cell phones. Shortcuts make sense when youâ€™re limited to 160 characters in a message, but nowhere else please!

Posted 3 years ago #
acemotel
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Magpie, do you mean, Putin, the president of GERMANY? (McCain actually said it!) Add, the random apostrophe\'s really just drive me nut\'s. Especially the possessive it\'s when the rule is so simple and has absolutely no exception\'s.

I had a grammar teacher once who carried around a Sharpie in her purse. She would actually mark out public misspellings and grammar errors. Leaving them, she said, conditioned people to wrong usage and was especially harmful to young children.

Letters from Seattle Public Schools with blatant errors do not engender confidence. I would get them routinely when my kids were students.

Posted 3 years ago #
flipjack
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Well, it seems I\'ve stirred the sleeping dragon in some people. :-)
Hey RonM...and I mean this as a humorous jab...
It\'s College not Collage. :-)
I suffer from mild dislexia too I think..just switching letters around.
The straw that broke the camel\'s back for me and made me start this thread was because of this screenshot I saw a while ago:

http://static.crooksandliars.com/2007/03/fox-caption2.jpg

Man that really got my goat!!

Posted 3 years ago #
acemotel
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RonM, my brother and my husband are both poor spellers. They didn\'t get the spelling gene. I forgive almost everything in private communications; it\'s the errors in official letters and public signs, the newspaper, published books!, menus, and the like that are so perplexing. There are professionals whose very jobs are to copy edit and proofread - compounding the errors in public does nothing to preserve our language, and confuses those who are poor spellers to begin with.

LOL flip, I get your point, than.

Posted 3 years ago #
Julie
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\"I\'m peeked....\" rather than \"I\'m piqued....\" (which means something quite different from \"I\'m peaked.\")

...and I think we\'ve lost the battle on \"begging the question\", which used to mean a kind of logical fallacy (petitio principii) in which the supposed evidence supporting the conclusion requires the same proof as the conclusion. (For example, \"The buses are overcrowded because they\'re too full.\")

But \"beg the question\" now seems to mean just \"call for the question\".

Language evolves, but is it evolving in a useful way?

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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Admiraljaneway, the possesive form would be more appropriate if you were to say i am going over to the nordstroms\' for dinner but not if you are going to the place. If you are going to nordstrom to go shopping you are just going to nordsrom just like if you were going to disneyland you would not say i am going to disneylands. :) and i know i have not capitalized, its quicker for me that way with my lame typing skills. I will add what else makes me irritated is that my daughter who attends seattle public schools stopped getting spelling lessons or tests after second grade, which seems crazy to me.

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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the nail salon i go to is called Tiffany Nails Salon and every time i am in there, i want to peel the s off of the board and move it to the end of tiffany. granted english is not the owners first language but who made the sign?? and why didn\'t they tell her???

Posted 3 years ago #
add
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Here\'s another one - \"I\'m siked\" (vs. \"I\'m psyched\"). Arrgh!

Posted 3 years ago #
squareeyes
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FLUKE!!! It\'s a stroke of good luck. I hear it used for any type of unexpected event, good or bad. Drives me nuts.

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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squareeyes, i must say i am an offender, i have been under the impression that fluke is more like a random error.. Had no idea it is a stroke of good luck I guess if you hear it enough used incorrectly you then do it yourself unknowingly. I better start packing my pocket Webster.:) Thanks for the info I will correct myself

Posted 3 years ago #
HP
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Just in case anyone has not heard of this there is a website called dictionary.com in case you don\'t have a dictionary handy.

Posted 3 years ago #
Anonymous
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HP - I use that website about 30 times a day! I\'m a huge fan!

Posted 3 years ago #
Jerald
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I, too, am disturbed by the number of mistakes in things that come home from the schools -- and the district. Letters from the superintendent, for instance, ALWAYS have an error or two. An example is \"a person THAT\" instead of \"a person WHO\" (one of my pet peeves).

The book \"Eats Shoots and Leaves\" actually comes with apostrophe stickers inside for correcting signs. We nitpickers are not alone!

Posted 3 years ago #
kirida
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I was disturbed by all the grammar mistakes in the Twilight Series by Stephenie Meyer and the fact that she called Lake Union \"UNION LAKE.\" Grrr.

Posted 3 years ago #
Julie
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Oh, yes: and \"mute point\" for \"moot point\".

Posted 3 years ago #
Julie
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Re: \"fluke\"--we had earlier been wondering about the derivation of this word. The post reminded me to look it up. Alas, the online OED (thanks, Seattle Public Library, for the free access!) lists the derivation as unknown, possibly from dialectical English for \"a guess\".

I hadn\'t known before I looked it up that it originated as a billiards term. Like HP, I\'d always used it for a chance occurrence or result, whether good luck or bad. Now I know.

Posted 3 years ago #
Julie
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On reading more carefully, I notice the OED also lists \"Also attrib. a fluke of wind: a chance breeze.\" So maybe this is the origin of its use to describe a chance occurrence? Hmm. Maybe I don\'t have to give up my former usage. This calls for deeper investigation.

Posted 3 years ago #
Cait
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I cannot STAND people who do not know the word \"supposedly\". It is not \"supposably\" or \"supposively\"... for god\'s sake, read a book.

Posted 3 years ago #
GenHillOne
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Slightly different, but in the same vein. . . cursive, or lack of it, in school. Other than a brief stint in the 3rd grade, nothing. They jump right into computers (keyboarding lessons not always included) and I think cursive is going to be wiped out within this one generation.

Posted 3 years ago #
acemotel
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Don\'t even get me started on the lack of cursive in public school. It\'s deplorable, and one of the main reasons I put my boys in private. Too late, though. They all have terrible handwriting. No handwriting, no grammar, minimal spelling. Diagramming sentences? Of course not. These are not priorities. I was told it was more important to get the kids writing creatively, period. Nevermind the lack of tools. Likewise the \"new math.\" There are some fabulous teachers in SPS, but the system in general: Run far away. It\'s a miracle ANY kids know the difference between then and than or two, too, and to.

Posted 3 years ago #
westseattledood
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Couldn\'t agree more with you!

Text Messaging is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. The availability of that particular technology to a generation who has barely acquired basic grammer/syntax/spelling skills is going to be nothing but trouble.

Have you heard that kids are thinking it is OK to TXT MSG potential employers? I don\'t know, maybe there is some higher level abstraction processes being utilized here when they write in abbreviations and creatively destroy standard syntax, but I think that would be a stretch.

I just really, really hate the epidemic of text messaging on cell phones. Arrgh! So Irritating!

Posted 3 years ago #
WSB
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Well, as the parent of a child who had extreme difficulty learning cursive because of some small-motor challenges, I\'m actually glad it\'s dying. I don\'t use it for anything but signing receipts/checks. And I spend so much time typing that when I have to take notes by hand at some meetings if the laptop\'s not along, I can barely read my own writing ...

Back to the original topic, SITE vs. SIGHT ... \"a site for sore eyes\" ... well, maybe if it\'s one of those abandoned lots that turns into a dump?

And phase vs. faze.

Posted 3 years ago #
Julie
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BTW, at our school, we teach, and students practice, both cursive handwriting and touch-typing. Both are useful skills. Practice helps, but cursive is, as lowmanbeach points out, very difficult for students with small-motor issues--so don't automatically blame the schools.

I also teach my students (3rd-5th grade) to use both spell- and grammar-check skeptically, and only as a secondary adjunct to using their own brain, peer editors, and adult editors. I suspect at least some of these misuses we're talking about originate in over reliance on spell-check. (Some, at least, pre-date word-processors, so maybe it's just a question of perpetuating existing confusion.)

Posted 3 years ago #
acemotel
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In my case it WAS the schools. My oldest son was begging to write cursive, and I helped as much as I could, but questioned the school why they didn't teach it. It's not a priority, I was told, in both the regular and APP programs of Seattle Schools.

Also, we taught the boys to touch type, it never happened at school.

Posted 3 years ago #
JenV
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I used to work for a large insurance company- ostensibly filled with educated people, right? No. My supervisor actually really thought that the correct way to spell "I'm" was "I'am". She also had NO clue on the correct usage of "your, you're" and "their, there & they're"

another funny thing that happened while I was there. We had a network outage, and when the email came in from IT they obviously used spell check instead of checking it themselves- because the email apologized for any "incontinence" it may have caused. ;)

Posted 3 years ago #
WSratsinacage
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Amen JenV. I experience that at work too. It is very frustrating to have people superior to me who don't know how to spell, conjugate, etc. Illiterate morons making more than me, priceless. I had this one boss who used made up words. Yeah, pay him 100k!

Posted 3 years ago #
mellaw6565
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WS - maybe he was paid for spelling outside of the box!

Posted 3 years ago #
WSratsinacage
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Yeah could be, good point. LOL

Posted 3 years ago #