In 1997, Isuzu introduced the new tagline \u201cGo Farther.\u201d Last year, Ford introduced the new tagline \u201cGo Further.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0So now I\u2019m hopelessly confused (not that I wasn\u2019t already). When should a copywriter use farther vs. further?<\/p>\n

As usual, my muse,\u00a0Grammar Girl<\/a>,\u00a0has the answer: \u201cuse ‘farther’ for physical distance and ‘further’ for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It’s easy to remember because ‘farther’ has the word ‘far’ in it, and \u2018far\u2019 obviously relates to physical distance.\u201d<\/p>\n

I should have been satisfied with GGirl\u2019s explanation. But since I\u2019m a person perversely driven to go farther, further or both whether I\u2019m driving a Ford or an Isuzu, I couldn\u2019t stop myself from clicking on the next Google result. At that spiffy little link,\u00a0Merriam-Webster<\/a>\u00a0(a.k.a. m-w.com) really had its grammar jammer on:<\/p>\n

\u201cFarther<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0further<\/em>\u00a0have been used more or less interchangeably throughout most of\u00a0their history, but currently they are showing signs of diverging. As adverbs they continue\u00a0to be used interchangeably whenever spatial, temporal, or metaphorical distance is\u00a0involved. But where there is no notion of distance,\u00a0further<\/em>\u00a0is used.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s way too temporal for me, m-w.com. The farther I get away from that definition the better.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to the issue of using the words \u201cfarthermost\u201d and \u201cfurthermore.\u201d Oh, please, MaliaMania,\u201d I hear you begging, \u201cdon\u2019t go there, spatially, metaphorically or otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1997, Isuzu introduced the new tagline \u201cGo Farther.\u201d Last year, Ford introduced the new tagline \u201cGo Further.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0So now I\u2019m hopelessly confused (not that I wasn\u2019t already). When should a copywriter use farther vs. further? As usual, my muse,\u00a0Grammar Girl,\u00a0has the answer: \u201cuse ‘farther’ for physical distance and ‘further’ for metaphorical, or figurative, distance. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maliakline.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}