Vive la difference

But in a June column on “go missing,” I unwittingly used the expression different than, writing that a phrase like “go to the store” employed “a different sense of go than the one in go missing.”

Reader Richard Siegel wondered if I had officially abandoned the traditional preference for different from in such constructions. “Different than makes its meaning just as clear as different from,” he conceded, “yet we would never say that A ‘differs than’ B.” But in fact, I wrote different than without a shred of self-consciousness - despite having been educated, like all editors of my generation, in the doctrine of different from.

This is not really surprising, as different than has been increasingly acceptable since the mid-20th century. In 1957, Bergen and Cornelia Evans defended it vigorously in their Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, citing uses of different than by Defoe, Coleridge, Thackeray, and Cardinal Newman, among others. They argued that different, though not “officially” a comparative like fatter and higher, is treated as a comparative adjective, since it allows modifiers of degree: We can say very different, entirely different, and so on.

The argument Siegel mentions - we say differ from, so we must say different from - was addressed by H.W. Fowler, in his 1926 “Modern English Usage,” where he called it “a hasty & ill-defined generalization.” (He was defending different to - then a popular variant, as it still is in England - but the argument is the same.) The preposition we use with the verb need not match the one we use with related adjectives or participles, Fowler noted: for instance, we say accords with but according to.

The irresistible appeal of different than, however, stems from its convenience as a way to introduce clauses: “It’s different than I remember” is more economical and less clunky than “it’s different from what I remember.” And most usage guides - the New York Times stylebook, for example - would be content if we could preserve different from with nouns and pronouns, and limit different than to introducing clauses. But once different than sounds normal with a clause, it will naturally migrate into different from territory, as it did in my sentence (which could have read “different from the one”).

In the forthcoming third edition of “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” Bryan Garner admits that “different than is sometimes idiomatic and even useful.” But on his new Language-Change Index, which puts disputed usages on a 5-point scale from “Rejected” to “Fully Accepted,” he ranks different than smack in the middle, in the category called “Widespread but. {hellip}”

This seems conservative to me; it may not be “fully accepted,” but different than is no longer a hot peeve, either. In fact, it shows up in the foreword to the 1999 edition of “The Elements of Style,” where Roger Angell - E.B. White’s stepson - writes, “I sometimes saw [White] reading his [New Yorker] piece over to himself, with only a slightly different expression than the one he’d worn on the day it went off.”

“Elements” itself still mandates different from, as it has since 1959. But I would argue that Angell’s usage - and the general lack of opposition - should put different than in Garner’s category 4, “Ubiquitous but{hellip}” - that is, acceptable to all but a few diehards.

. . .

ONE SUD, TWO SUDS: The president’s beer summit inspired enough groanworthy puns to last us the rest of the year. But as the brew-ha-ha was fading, a radio announcer roused my curiosity with a reference to “one last sud.” Does suds really have a singular?

Turns out people have been debating the source of suds for a while. In an 1871 book, “The Origin of Language and Myths,” Morgan Kavanagh claimed it was related to sudor, Latin for “sweat.” Others linked it to seethe, but he argued that such an origin wouldn’t explain its plural form: “Professor Latham’s late edition of Johnson’s dictionary,” which derived suds from seethe, admitted that “there seems no reason {hellip} against saying a sud.” Another 19th century writer, Charles Mackay, claimed suds was based on the Gaelic saod, meaning “state, condition.”

Suds’s origins are still not absolutely certain. But the American Heritage Dictionary and other contemporary sources agree that a likely source is “Dutch zudse, marsh, from Middle Dutch sudse.” That would mean that suds began life as a singular, and though it could, like kudos, be reinterpreted as plural and sprout a new singular form, it hasn’t done so yet.

E-mail Jan Freeman at mailtheword@gmail.com. For past columns, go to boston.com/ideas.