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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2407 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 31, 2025

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older than me

Double-dipping but my instinct is to say that this is correct. In the same way you would use 'He is older than her' rather than 'He is older than she'. But I see there is much disagreement.

I like this reddit post:

So, in the future, you're really better off consulting Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for questions like this. You can see a preview here.

What it has to say on the issue of than, starting on the left column of page 892, is that "[a] dispute over whether than is a preposition or a conjunction has been going on now for more than two centuries. It is one portion of the price we pay for the 18th-century assumption that the parts of speech of Latin and Greek are readily applicable to English, an assumption that continues to gain uncritical acceptance to this day."

After describing the side championed by Lowth 1762 (holding essentially that after than comes the nominative case, except than whom), the side you're basically getting here, it quite sensibly allows for the use of than as preposition or conjunction, licensing both "taller than I" and "taller than me", citing Shakespeare ("A man no mightier than thyself or me", Julius Caesar, 1600), and several distinguished 19th and 20th century authors for prepositional uses of the phrase.

https://old.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/oig7q/my_brother_is_two_years_older_than_i_or_than_me/

Older than I (am) is the correct form, prescriptively, but usage varies, per your point.

It's not necessarily older than I (am) though.

Consider--"he looks older than dirt." This isn't saying, he looks older than dirt looks, it's saying he simply looks older than dirt itself, dirt as a concept. Older than dirt is also wouldn't be correct--it would imply that the statement depends on dirt's current age, e.g. that he looks younger than dirt generally will in a few hundred years, which is asinine.

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