It's not over

This week someone on Twitter quoted a tweet from a fellow journalist: "Not to be dramatic, but the day @APStylebook made it okay to say 'over' when it should be 'more than' was humanity's worst day." 

Not to be dramatic, but, hearing the alarm, I reached for my musket to head for Lexington Common. 

We know where this comes from. An entry in the "Don't List" of James Gordon Bennett at The New York Herald reads: "Don't use 'over' in in the sense of 'more than.'" No explanation, just a fiat. A distinction with no foundation in English (we'll get to that) invented in nineteenth-century American journalism made its way eventually into the Associated Press Stylebook, to be taught as an article of faith in journalism schools and newsrooms. 

The usage note to "over" in The American Heritage Dictionary attributes the distinction to William Cullen Bryant, another nineteenth-century editor, and concurs that the distinction has been championed by American editors who offer no explanation. "Over" for "more than," American Heritage says, has been in English since the 1300s and is fully standard.

Now, mind you, there's a place in my heart for pedantry. All my sympathies are with anyone who deplores that "beg the question" has come to mean "prompt the question" rather than "you've made a dumbass fallacious argument." The traditional sense, as Bryan Garner reminds us, is to make a circular argument--"that is, to base a conclusion on an assumption that is as much in need of proof or demonstration as the conclusion itself." If I see "beg the question" in someplace like The New York Review of Books, I see that someone is holding on to the traditional sense, and it would be nice to maintain it, but that train has left the station.   

But "over/more than," that "over" can only be used to indicate spatial relationships, has no such traditional footing. It's merely an arbitrary distinction arbitrarily maintained in newspaper journalism for decades. It is, in Arnold Zwicky's felicitous term, a "zombie rule." It has no life, it has been repeatedly debunked, and yet it walks among us. 

Jeremy Butterfield, in Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, refers to the "strong tradition in American newspapers and some American usage guides of absolute, unconditional, almost maniacal hostility to the use of over with a following numeral to mean 'in excess of, more than.'" He advises, "It is useful for editors and writers of other varieties of English to be aware that the anxiety continues (and, to judge by some editorial forums, can almost induce nausea or hyperventilation)." 

Oh, Jeremy would be on my side at Lexington Common.   

That meaningless distinction is one of a number of bogus rules that I campaigned against for years, until finally, at the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society in 2014, the editors of the AP Stylebook announced that the "over/more than" distinction was being dropped. There was a chorus of groans in the room, and, as we see on Twitter, the pissing and moaning about it has not died away. 

That ACES conference in Las Vegas in 2014 drew lexicographers from Merriam-Webster's and American Heritage, who told me they were amazed to learn that American editors had been championing a distinction that they had never seen in English. And if you trouble to look into dictionaries, you will find that they uniformly register "over" as a synonym of "more than." 

Yes, I woke up this morning and decided to swat a gnat with a ball peen hammer. But let me suggest that in all discussions like this there is an unspoken but important question lurking beneath the surface: Just what is the source of your expertise in these matters?