‘Of course Gladstone was 20 times cleverer than you,’ said my husband. ‘Much more, most likely. Why should anyone think different?’
‘”Differently”, darling. Anyway, they don’t mind my saying “cleverer than you”. It’s “cleverer than me” they don’t like.’ My husband is easily defeated and went back to his Famous Grouse and his Herwig’s Art of Curing Sympathetically. Some chance.
Yes, I had written ‘cleverer than me’ (5 April), not of conscious purpose, but because the construction must have entered my mental syntax replication machinery. It all hinges on whether than is a conjunction or a preposition. If it can be the latter, I’m in the clear.
It did not take me long to find an eminent ally in Dr Robert Burchfield, the editor of New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. As he says, than can be a conjunction in sentences such as ‘Diana has better manners than I’, where there is an ellipsis at the end, with the implied construction ‘than I have’.
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