@RFMacG - As a Scot, I really shouldn't have missed out your patronym, sorry. I agree with you that it is a shame that there seems to be no way to add bold and italic etc, and I'm sure nobody will object to your underscores. And if I could just comment on one of my own bugbears: thank you for breaking your second comment up into chunks. I don't know about anyone else, but I find it makes it much easier to read. Just saying! (That'll annoy someone, no doubt!)

Oh, and I Iiked the closing HTML tags in your first comment - perhaps you should put these forward for consideration for HTML5. :)

re: bling - I might agree with you that it's not so much the expense as the showiness. Anyway, here's a peculiarly British take on bling-bling: - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSNK-9v7_JI

@Skeeter Lewis - I have no problem with starting sentences with a conjunction, and don't regard it as an error, but perhaps three sentences in a row with the same conjunction is a bit much. :)

You say that for your generation it's a solecism but that seems to me to be flying in the face of all the evidence I presented. And just so you know, I'm over retiral age myself, and had a very traditional education. But there were certain things we were taught at school that are simply not the case today, although I don't particularly remember being taught anything about different.

The fact that some people have objected to "different to" doesn't necessarily make it an error. In his later book, Fowler (1926) "stoutly defends 'different to' " (MWDEU) and it is obviously part of standard British English (except perhaps in the Economist). You don't have to use it if you don't like it, but there is little basis for calling it a "solecism" (and by implication saying that people like me are wrong, or, God forbid - uneducated).

MWDEU - http://books.google.com/books?id=2yJusP0vrdgC&pg=PA341

Memo to self - I must control this urge to begin every sentence with "And"

@Denkof Zwemmen - Any chance of some examples?

Erratum - that New Fowler's quote should of course have read: "in the face of past and present evidence or of logic"
Addendum - language evolves

@Skeeter Lewis - well here's one educated Brit that doesn't avoid "different to" in certain circumstances. Yes, most of us use "different from" to compare two things, for example - "This one is different from that one", but when it is followed by a clause, especially a "what" clause, I find myself drawn to "to" - "This is different to what I expected". Now whereas this may not find favour with Americans, it is perfectly acceptable in British English.

Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary - "It's very different to what I'm used to"

Macmillan Dictionaries - "American English is slightly different to British English." (rather apt in the circumstances that one!)

Longman - "Her jacket's different to mine."

Chambers - In current British English, different is followed more or less equally by 'from' or 'to' - "He was, in fact, totally different from Keith" " This is very different to the ideal situation" "The next day was Christmas Eve, but it was no different to any other day except that the shop was very, very busy."

Practical English Usage (Michael Swan) - "American football is very different from/to soccer"

New Fowler's puts forward reasons why both different from and different than can have their uses: "The commonly expressed view that different should only be followed by from and never to or than is not supportable in the face of past and present evidence of logic, though the distribution of the constructions is not straightforward"

@Denkof Zwemmen - I believe "different from" is the most common usage on both sides of the Atlantic. Ngram viewer show "different from" well in the lead in British published books. But most modern British authorities equally allow "different to" in British English. "Different than", on the other hand is mainly an American usage. And you slightly cherry-picked that 1908 quote from Fowler. Just before that he wrote "There is no essential reason whatever why [different] should not be as well followed by to as by from. But ...". - http://www.bartleby.com/116/217.html

From the Guardian Style Guide: "different from is traditionally the correct form; different to is widely accepted nowadays ... - http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/d

And the title of one Guardian article - "Why writing an app is different to writing a children's picture book" - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2012/jul/30/writing-apps-picture-books

And from the London Review of Books - "The articles you seek may appear further down the list of results than you expect if your requirements are different to those of the majority of users. The London Review of Books search function does not recognise ‘wildcards’." - http://www.lrb.co.uk/librarian/search-help-and-tips

And a couple of Telegraph article titles - "The skull bone is different to the hip bone" and "Libya: Is the tale of Tripoli different to any other conflict?" - the latter article by John Simpson - https://www.google.com/search?q="different to" the telegraph

The Economist Style Guide, however, is not so forgiving - from and only from - and I could find no mention of "different to" in the Times. But I'm not a journalist, so I don't feel bound by any house rules, only what is acceptable in BrE.

@RFG - I presume you're playing with the rules with your definition of bling, as it doesn't seem to gel with any definition I've seen, although it looks as if you might be right about the origins:

expensive, ostentatious clothing and jewellery: look at the bling he’s already wearing on his left arm - (Oxford Dictionaries Online)

flashy jewelry worn especially as an indication of wealth (Merriam-Webster Online)

flashy, ostentatious jewelry; "the rapper was loaded with bling" (The Free Dictionary)

also bling-bling, by 1997, U.S. rap slang, "wealth, expensive accessories," a sound suggestive of the glitter of jewels and precious metals (cf. German blinken "to gleam, sparkle"). (Etymology Online)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/radio/specials/1130_uptodate2/page2.shtml

Your reading of "one of the best" is unusual, to say the least. It's all comparative, you know (pun intended). Finally, I think you mean endemic rather than epidemic, perhaps? Or were you playing with us again? In fact the more I read it the more I wonder if your whole post isn't one enormous game to catch us out.

Happy Christmas :)

@Katie - "What's up?" is an interesting one for me,as in British English it usually has a rather different meaning - "What's the matter?" or "What's the problem?", although we are now all familiar with the American meaning from the Bud ads. There's an English language magazine here called "What's up in Warsaw", which always struck me as being rather an unfortunate title.

Secondly, I'm glad you mentioned that you use "How are you?" as a greeting, as this is another AmE / BrE difference. I've always had the impression that that is how Americans use it, for example when speaking to complete strangers (me, for example). But for us Brits it is nearly always a question demanding an answer (although we don't particularly want a detailed response) and only used with people we know. When a stranger says this to us, our reaction is "Sorry, do I know you?"

There seems to have been one seem too many there.

@Hairy Scot - I accept that there has been a problem with grammar teaching in schools. But it's a thorny problem: how do you teach grammar in a way that's relevant to children, in a way that doesn't stifle them, as traditional grammar teaching did to a certain extent? How do you teach Standard English in a country where it is estimated that less than 15% have Standard English as their maternal language, without denying a person's background? It seems a comparative approach seems to work best.

In an article I read recently, a linguist concerned with English teaching pointed out that
the EFL / ESL publishing world has largely agreed on a systematically codified descriptive grammar, which is missing from native-speaker teaching.

"Standard English is highly codified for foreign learners by commercial publishers. But at present it is not at all codified for UK learners. At one time linguists might have argued that this doesn’t matter, because we don’t need a description of our own language; such descriptions are of purely scientific interest. But that argument was always a bad one because Standard English is not the native language of about 90% of the population in the UK (and I imagine the situation is similar in other English-speaking countries). "

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/SEhudson.htm

Sorry, but you won't be surprised to hear that I'm not convinced about the broadsheets and the beeb dumbing down; I think they are simply reflecting the language of their readers and listeners rather more than they used to. Remember that for years, the BBC was a bastion of RP, an accent that is only spoken by about 2% of the population. Isn't there a case for saying that the BBC should reflect the language of its licence payers, in all its diversity, rather than the language of the elite? Personally I welcome this opening up, but I doubt we'll ever agree on the that one.

And lastly I would just point to the phenomenon of blogging. More people than ever before are writing regularly, and others are reading. Surely the fact that so many people want to write is a sign of health in the language, not of deterioration?

Have a good one. :))