My English language teacher, from 1951 and my first attending Purley County Grammar School for Boys, In Old Cousdon, Surrey, was a Mr Fishlock. The car he drove, a pre-war Riley, he had won, in that era, from using his ‘mastery’ of the language in an Illustrated London News competition. During my time there he won £50, a not inconsiderable sum of money in those days, for writing the ‘launch’ slogan for a new, national, daily paper:- ‘The NEW Daily that’s NEW daily’. The paper was the Daily Sketch.

His ‘You’ll ALWAYS remember this, Smith’, advice was ‘conjunctions join, don’t separate words and phrases within a sentence’. Have I been living in blissful, ‘wrongly educated’ ignorance for the last sixty one years, or was he – God rest him and his teaching expertise – correct?

I will await any – polite ONLY please – ‘comment’ with extreme interest.

And, by the way, the OED, yes, the OED lists ‘different to’ as the correct version! I was also excited to find that Brian of 2010 gave the etymological explanation so clearly.

I further wanted some ‘proof’ (being a PhD with thirty years experience in English is not enough) that one should speak of ‘the boy whom I saw’ not ‘the boy who I saw. As an IELTS examiner in Speaking I have been reprimanded for ‘changing the wording’ of questions; I used ‘whom’, correctly, where the script reads ‘who’. Now I’m just not prepared to say it wrongly. But they may fire my ass, as the Americans say. And I just started sentences with But and And – you see, I can be flexible.