Apple's new app store policy becomes even more restrictive

[Steve]

Kudos to them for writing in plain English though I guess. Here's some snippets: -

 

We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical App. It can get complicated, but we have decided to not allow certain kinds of content in the App Store.

 

We have lots of kids downloading lots of apps, and parental controls don't work unless the parents set them up (many don't). So know that we're keeping an eye out for the kids.

 

We have lots of serious developers who don't want their quality Apps to be surrounded by amateur hour.

 

We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, 'I'll know it when I see it.' And we think that you will also know it when you cross it. If your app is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to. If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps.

 

Dear, oh dear. Thankfully there's still some open platforms like the PC and Android.

[Chris]

We view Apps different than books or songs

 

I know people who get on their high horse about syntax - especially when the semantic intent of a sentence isn't really compromised - tend to be pricks, but jesus that's not far off a troglodyte saying "me food mouth good mmm"

[doppelkorn]

There will have been hours and hours spent in meetings deciding about why to choose that particular tone.

[Jimmy]

fair play. they do what they want and disregard everything else. i applaud that.

[doppelkorn]

Sorry my post above looks like it's replying to Chris directly when I hadn't seen his post.

 

To directly reply to Chris: that sentence is fine syntactically, it's a straight BrEn vs AmEn difference as far a I can tell.

[Steve]

fair play. they do what they want and disregard everything else. i applaud that.

 

SMH

[Chris]

'different than' is one of those things that is regarded as correct because the battle to stop American people saying it has been lost though, right? I suppose you could argue that anything that people use intuitively is fair game for accepting, but battering nuances out of a language is just going to stop people developing some of the critical faculties that can be afforded from them - and at some point 'should of' is going to be fine and I'll finally have to go on a kill spree.

 

But anyway it's not just that, it's 'we view' x 'different than' y and z. Either qualify 'different' with an adverb ('as different') or turn it into an adverb itself ('differently') otherwise you're just smashing the two ideas "we view apps" and "apps different than books" together without actually saying that you view apps differently to books (or that you view apps as different to books, which is subtly semantically different and I think probably closer to Apple's sentiment).

 

Anyone reading this should probably know that Dopp is the one doing a linguistics degree/masters, though, and so he's almost certainly right and I wrong.

[Chris]

Also, as a point of preference, phonetically I think it's ugly - it's a mouthful and quite often when things don't flow off the tongue my inner pedant alarm bells ring. In contrast a dodgy sentence that invokes artful cadence often makes me forgive, or miss, its errors*. It's like how you wouldn't mind as much if Jessica Alba trumped in front of you as if Waynetta Slob did, I suppose.

 

 

*edit: a sentence can't make an error, can it... the error lies with the writer, not the sentence. A sentence can have faults though I suppose - even though it can't be its fault. Disclaimer: I think I make a lot of this stuff up and forget.

[doppelkorn]

I fully back you up from a point of style and possibly phonetics.

 

Basically the than/from distinction is a matter of preference. If you're really interested, a good discussion can be read by the excellent Stan Carey here.

 

The use of "different" here would be what's apparently known as a flat adverb. One of the Merriam Webster editors defends these in this 2-min video

 

 

To be honest my degree doesn't really cover this kind of stuff. We look more at language as a cognitive act than as a cultural artefact, which is kind of disappointing for many because 90% of people on the course come from a language background and expect old school philology. We then get rinsed doing what is basically a psychology masters!

[doppelkorn]

One interesting point.

 

I find flat adverbs to be used more often in AmEn although one sticks out. We would say:

 

"I feel bad for him"

 

but I've heard from Americans

 

"I feel badly for him"

 

which seems to reverse the trend completely.

[Chris]

Cheers for that, very interesting reading/viewing. I think different is actually an interesting word because it creates a comparison but the context of the comparison is found elsewhere, compared to a comparative where everything's neatly bundled up (like 'bigger') and the word 'than' shows the subject of the comparison. 'Different than' feels tautological, somehow, even if it's not on closer inspection.

 

Can all adverbs be flat? Apple says 'different' can, at least, with the "Think Different" slogan. Check me out, nearly bringing things back on topic.

[Jimmy]

#wordnerd

[dissonance]

Noam Chimpsky, to the rescue!

[Gizmo]

http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/different-from-than-or-to

 

My English sensibilities feels that "different to" sounds perfectly acceptable, but I probably would use "ly".

 

Informative video too.

[Gizmo]

I suppose I should have said perfect acceptable in the context of this thread.

[doppelkorn]

German adverbs are almost all flat. I suspect that the American preference for them comes from that. I bet that's an acceptable topic for a dissertation.