The perils of writing late at night. The second part of the first paragraph should have read something like:

By all means choose short words over long, simple rather than over-complex. Yes, it is true that the use of longer words, often of Latin derivation, can be pretentious (although it can also sometimes lead to greater precision or nuance). But is it any less pretentious to use words (real or invented) known only to a small band of enthusiasts (i.e. words that are foreign to people like me), rather than use the perfectly normal words that everyone knows, simply because they happen to have come into English from French or Latin? Methinks not.

As this thread now seems to have left the realms of what I would recognise as English, I gracefully bow out and leave the field to the Anglish speakers. I would leave you with one thought, however. By all means choose short words over long, simple rather than over-complex. But is it any less pretentious to use words (real or invented) known only to a small band of enthusiasts (i.e. words that are foreign to people like me), than to use perfectly normal words that happen to have come into English from French or Latin, when they are the words everyone knows? Methinks not.

What differentiates English from other Germanic languages is that very admixture of Anglo-Saxon and French. To deny that is to deny linguistic history. Most of the great literature of English, from Shakespeare on, has drawn on that rich heritage, and its writers have profited from the broad choice of words that was available.

And like most languages, English is ruled by custom (and that includes British spelling) and the common sense of its speakers, not by the dictates of prescriptivist grammarians or the fanciful whims of etymological purists, of whatever stripe. "Custom", as the writer Ben Jonson said, "is the most certain mistress of language".

@daniel owens - nice of you to drop by and give us your fascinating insights into this debate. But somehow I seemed to miss what your language point was? It obviously came as a bit of a shock to you that on a language discussion website people actually discussed language, rather than think that throwing out cheap insults constituted a useful contribution. But I suppose it takes all sorts.

@HS - Yes, of course (even with to!). Life would be very boring otherwise. But think about it, there is no logical reason why deal should be followed by with, or see by to. Like many phrasal verbs, they are idiomatic, not literal. They sound natural to us because we've grown up with them, but try telling a foreign learner they're obvious, they probably won't see it quite the same way.

For the same reason something that we are not familiar with may sound odd to us, but for people who are used to hearing them they are perfectly natural. Oddity is in the ear of whatever the aural equivalent of beholder is.

More on "to".
1) I discovered via another thread here that there are some Americans that only know the expression "no end" as in "it pleased me no end" with an added "to" - "it pleased me to no end", which for me would suggest "to no good purpose". But no. It's just their version of the idiom.

2) In Bristol, they say "where is something/somebody to" - "Where's he to, then?" "Where's the bus stop to?"

It's not that strange really; think of - "Perhaps it’s time to see to the ads that are just plain downers"

I googled "it's time to deal to" and came up with 16 hits. Apart from a couple of references to this post, they all seem to be from New Zealand. There's another from the NZ Herald:

League: It's time to deal to distraction

and a couple on NZ blogs:

With the EIIIs dispatched or run off it's time to deal to the balloons (www.kiwisim.net.nz)

But now that the beach days are behind me, it's time to deal to the frizzy ends and flaky tan (themovingpicturenow.com)

So it's time to deal to the unsightliness (marthaofthesouthpacific.wordpress.com)

So it does indeed look as though it's a new Zealand thing. Good on them, I say.

Hi porsche, I've had very similar ones on my blog, so as soon as I saw it I was suspicious. I delete them there because my blog is for foreign learners and the grammar they used was awful. Talking of grammar, thanks for backing me up elsewhere, by the way.

@HS - to see how it is being used just do a site search of a newspaper, for example the two Scottish ones I gave (more focused than a general Google search). Incidentally my figures for the Telegraph were a bit off. Use of the "to" version also seems to be higher in the tabloids.

As for me, I used to think I reserved it for cases where it was followed by "what" or "that" - "It's different to what I expected" - but I'm not so sure now.

Incidentally one reason you might be seeing it a lot is that it is apparently more popular than the "from" version in Australia.

http://books.google.pl/books?id=ZVIBxksRuEgC&pg=PA603&dq=%22different+to%22&hl=en#v=onepage&q=%22different%20to%22&f=false

Trivia corner - British PM David Cameron uses it a lot. "I am different to Margaret Thatcher, different to past Conservative governments ..." - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12443396

All the best till the next one.

@bradmontreal - It looks as though I spoke a bit too quickly. Although for me (and I think most dictionaries) the standard idiom is "no end", reading that Motivated Grammar post more carefully I realise that there's a sizeable group of people in North America for whom "to no end" is the version of the idiom they know (best). If that's the case for you, then my answer to your question would be a definite "yes".