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Difference/Differential
Vive la Differential?
By Evan Jenkins
Steve Parrott, director of university relations at the University of Iowa (see Important/Importantly) had a legitimate gripe."While I appreciate that you recognize the difference between the printed and spoken word," he e-mailed, "I hope and pray that you will admonish sportscasters who use 'differential' when the word 'difference' would seem to suffice for describing the score of a sporting event."
Suffice it does. And "differential" indeed has a drumbeat quality in sports broadcasts — one of those awful things some of us do when we want to sound fancy. But the abuse of "differential" is not new, or limited to one medium.
The second edition (1965) of H. W. Fowler's "Dictionary of Modern English Usage" discussed the legitimate use of the word, as noun and adjective, not to mean "difference" but to denote something based on a difference — differential rates of pay, for instance, varying by the skills required for a job. (Some of us remember the night differential — extra pay to compensate for the pain of working when most of our colleagues were resting from their labors.)
"But then the rot sets in," wrote the editor, Sir Ernest Gowers. "Differentials ...is increasingly used, under the influence of love of the long word, as an imposing synonym for differences of all sorts...Perhaps the rot might be stopped if everyone were to bear in mind that Ophelia did not say You must bear your rue with a differential, nor did Wordsworth write But she is in her grave, and O the differential to me."
Heavenly. And when the Knicks lead the Spurs 101-99, that's not a two-point differential. It's just a difference.
CJR
