Something Different

In his column for Punch, July 17, 1957 Wodehouse wrote:

Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., is a man who can be pushed just so far. When they upped his Federal and State taxes, as they are doing all the time these days, he did not wince nor cry aloud but wrote a cheque and posted it to the local vampire bats. But when he got a New York State tax form which included the words "Give complete address used for 1956 if different than the above" he felt the time had come to make a stand. He wrote to Governor Harriman about it. I don't know what he said, but it was probably something not very different than "Well, youse guys up in Albany certainly laid an egg that time. Ain't you never been to school and been learned grammar? Where do you get that 'different than' stuff? Different from, you poor uneducated slobs."
The point, in the opinion of most taxpayers, is well taken. What I mean to say, ginks like I and you and the rest of us we don't mind having our blood sucked annually by a bunch of Draculas, but we think they got a nerve when they suck it like as if they'd never of heard of any such a bozo as Fowler, if you see what I mean.

To be fair, they wouldn't have found an answer in the first edition of Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), which doesn't even mention "different than" in its discussion of whether different can only be followed by from or if to is also admissible. Fowler derides the idea that to is to be rejected on the basis that it never accompanies the root verb differ (i.e., "You do not say differ to; therefore you cannot say different to" is mere superstition and/or pedantry). They would have to wait for Burchfield's New Fowler (1996) to be enlightened, only to find that all forms—from, to, than—are equally valid in the new editor's opinion, based both on Fowler's logic and on the history of English, since the OED shows that all the combinations have been used for centuries.

But at the time Mr. Genz actually won the argument. As it happens, we do know exactly what he wrote to Governor W. A. Harriman and what the Governor replied and did, because the incident was reported in many newspapers since around May 1957, with more or less creativity on the part of the reporters. The Buffalo Courier-Express for May 5 writes, for example:

Harvard. Princeton Men Are Blamed
Tax Blanks' Grammatical Error Vexes Yale Grad
ALBANY, May 4 (AP)—Gov. Harriman today advised a fellow Yale graduate that a grammatical error on New York's income tax form was the work of a Harvard man and "an untutored editor who professes to be 'a Princetonian at heart.'"
Harriman wrote to Leonard F. Genz of Greenwich, Conn., that Genz had been the first in years to spot the error, and assured Genz it would be corrected on next year's forms.
Genz wrote to the Governor and complained that the form said: "Give complete address used for 1955 if different than above."
"On next year's forms," Genz asked, "may we please have English and Connecticut grammar (instead of New York grammar) and the expression 'different from?'"
Harriman replied that investigation had turned up the Harvard and Princeton men as the culprits.
He said that "for reasons now obscure, they chose to disregard the purists and cling to the "'different than'—perhaps for emphasis or because of common usage."
The Governor said the correction would cause no extra expense, since new forms must be printed anyway.
And he assured Genz that "the amount of your 1957 tax will not, on that account at all events, be different from last year's."

I haven't been able to find copies of NY income tax forms from that period to compare them—or rather, I waded through dozens of Google hits, but couldn't locate the exact forms with the offending phrase and its correction, but then I am not a NY taxpayer so I haven't been brought up to navigate that maze of paperwork.

Other periodicals provide more color or interesting additional information. The Schenectady Gazette for May 7 has: "Gov. Harriman said Mr. Genz was the first to notice the error although millions of tax forms have been distributed. The governor is mistaken. A number of persons have noticed the error. But most people are so anxious to get to the point where the tax is computed that they have little inclination to ponder over wording that is different from, or different than, what it should be." A later summary in the Albany Times-Union for August 20 informs us that "The Herald Tribune went so far as to take a dig at those 'ignorant fools in Albany who don't know anything except how to separate the citizen from his money." A new Jersey paper ridiculed the controversy with this sentence: 'A man and a dog are both different from a fox, but the man is more different than the dog.'" We also learn from the second source that "Genz, the man who started it all, is a business executive in New York who makes a hobby of spotting grammatical errors. Once he caught Winston Churchill in a slip, in one of his books, which won him a lunch with Churchill aboard the Queen Elizabeth." I haven't traced this last incident, which if true promises to be fraught with interest.

* * *

Going back to Wodehouse, given his strong opposition to than in this construction, it is to be expected that he stuck to from always. And so he did, as far as I've been able to ascertain. The only exception (apart from the ironic "something not very different than" in Punch above) would be the phrase "it's no different than marrying an heiress" in chapter 15 of The Luck of the Bodkins. But this is found only in the British edition (Jenkins 1935 and its successors Autograph, Penguin, Overlook). The American edition (Little 1936), which prints an earlier, shorter version of the novel, has in chapter 14 "it's not different from marrying an heiress," and the two serializations agree: "it wouldn't be any different from marrying an heiress" (Redbook in the UK and The Passing Show in the US). I have no doubt that Wodehouse's first and only choice here was from, and that than is the work of his British editor or a typesetter.

Searching digital repositories for more instances of "different than" produces what turns out to be a false positive. In chapter 14.7 of Bring On the Girls the somewhat convoluted sentence "It is hard to imagine two worlds more different than the one the authors said good-bye to as they left the Impney and that into which they plunged upon disembarking from the Aquitania" may appear at first glance to contain the solecism, but a closer look reveals that "than" in this case is governed not by "different" but by "more." This becomes clearer if one restores the elided complement of different: "two worlds more different [from each other] than the one ... and that into which ..."