LANGUAGE CORNER
More Than/Over
Dumb and Dumber
Somewhere along the line, a lot of us were taught that we had to say "more than," and not "over," when dealing with amounts. Somebody could be over six feet tall, but we had to say more than ten years. It's a picky rule — "over" is at least as common as "more than" in literate speech — but harmless until, as happens often with rules, we follow it out the window. Then we get something like this: "...a salary just under "$25,000...and well more than Clinton himself would make as attorney general." Arg. "Well more than" flat-out mangles idiom; nobody says anything but "well over." So if we ignore the rule — honor it in the breach, as it were — we'll never perpetrate "well more than."
— CJR Jan./Feb. 1997
Addendum, 9/11/00:
Another lulu, born of following that silly rule out the window: "He should command well more than $10 million a year." Clank.
More On 'More Than'
Doris I. Fenske, an editor at Ernst & Young in New York, e-mailed to say she was repeatedly running into uses of the preposition "over" like this one: "The concert was attended by over 1,000 people." Long ago, she said, she was taught to use "more than" in such instances. "But lately I am seeing 'over' everywhere, and my red pen can barely keep up," Ms. Fenske wrote. "Am I fighting a losing battle?"
It's one that should not have been joined; the rule long foisted on huge numbers of us doesn't make sense. There's nothing wrong with "more than" (though it has at least one pitfall; see "More Than/Over," above) but there's nothing wrong with "over," either.
According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, the idea of insisting on "more than" for countable quantities sprang full-grown from the head of William Cullen Bryant, the poet and journalist, in 1877, when he was editor of the New York Evening Post. Bryant gave no explanation for his edict, but journalists picked it up, and taught it, down to our time. No one, apparently, has tried to prohibit "over" when dealing with amounts not thought of as countable singly; constructions like "over $30,000 a year" seem always to have been acceptable. But for both countable quantities and round amounts, the dictionary says, "over" has been standard English since the 14th century, and it mentions James Thurber, W.H. Auden and Henry David Thoreau among those using the word the good old-fashioned way. That, and all those centuries of earlier precedent, would seem to make "over" unexceptionable. Better still, natural.
