For awhile now, I've been wanting to do a topic on spelling, grammar, syntax, connotations and so on. But I didn't want to seem like I'm being Mr. Know It All. I don't know it all and I'm often asking myself what's the right spelling or how should this properly be written. It's a thing that bugs me a lot. I spend so much time going over my posts, trying not to make mistakes. And if I spot a mistake later on, I feel terrible about it.
Let's start with an easy word problem that I sometimes fall into and I see others wrestling with, as well. When to use "then" and when to use "than."
Back at the dawn of time, when I was in high school, I did computing. And back then we had to make flow charts for the programs we were writing and we had to make a big stack of computer cards, which our teacher would then take to the big computer somewhere else in the city--and a day or two later, we'd get the print-out of our program back and see what stupid mistakes we made in our program.
So one fundamental program for all computing is "if ... then ..." And you see that "then" produces a result. "Than," on the other hand, is a comparative. "This ... is bigger than that ..." Here I always think of the signs < (less than) and > (greater than). You can have sentences that use both, such as "If Bobby is taller than Tommy then Bobby should pick the apples from the top of the tree." This can be expressed in a computer program like so:
If B1 > T1 then B picks x from y; where B1=the height of Bobby, T1=the height of Tommy, B=Bobby, x=apples and y=the top of the tree
So they are very different words, yet almost the same in spelling--and many of us will pronounce the words the same (except maybe when we're trying to put some stress on the word).
Here's an example from a post I saw--but I've changed words that might identify which post it was, because we're not here to shame people:
"The lack of respect for Nick Charles is likely more to do with Nick being more out of date then the rest of the detectives then with him being less intelligent."
This is wrong, but why is it wrong? This is something we have to puzzle out to see why the spelling is wrong. In fact, the spelling is wrong because both times we're using "than" to make comparisons. The tip-off is the use of "more" and "less." Nick Charles is more out of date than the others and less intelligent than the others. The lack of respect is more to do with the former than the latter.
Of course, since we're on our devices and we might not have time to make sure the spelling is right, it's bound to happen that there's lot of mistakes in our posts. Nevertheless, purely because I'm a word nerd, when I stumble across such errors then I'm always working out what the error is and how it should be corrected.
edit: Even after going over this post a few times, I still made little mistakes that I had to correct.