Can we settle the further-farther distinction once and for all? ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY

F_arther_ or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing, sometimes to the consternation of copy editors, a number of whom abide by the convention that farther is for literal distance and further for metaphoric distance. I don’t think the convention makes sense, however, and, when challenged, I cite the venerable and crotchety H. W. Fowler, who wrote in his 1926 “Dictionary of Modern English Usage” that “hardly anyone uses the two words for different occasions.” To me it sounds kosher to say that John hiked further into the woods even though John has hiked a literal distance, and kosher to say that The Facebook birthday salutation is farther from the true spirit of conviviality than the greeting card is, even though Facebook’s distance from humane practice is, in this case, metaphoric.

Is there any meaningful way to distinguish the words? Fowler found one in the Oxford English Dictionary. He wasn’t convinced by it, though, and pooh-poohed it as more aspirational than real—something the editors of the O.E.D. wished were true but wasn’t quite. Still, to me it seems much more subtle than the division between literal farthers and metaphoric furthers, and I’d like to explain it in order to, um, further its career.

The root of the confusion around the words lies in their etymologies. The older of the two is further, and it originally didn’t have anything to do with far. In modern English, a comparative is, of course, formed by adding -er to the end of a word. Once upon a time—between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries, the O.E.D. estimates—there was a comparative of far in English, and it was farrer, which no doubt went extinct because it’s the sort of word that doesn’t roll easily off one’s tongue unless one is a pirate. Further seems to have begun life as the comparative of an altogether different word: fore or forth. (He went forth, and after lunch and a nap he got up and went even further.) In other words, further didn’t originally mean “more distant” but something like “more ahead,” or, as the contemporary O.E.D. puts it, “more forward, more onward.” This meaning of further is pretty close to that of farrer, and, perhaps because relatively few of them were pirates, people began to substitute the former for the latter.

Fowler thought that once people started using further to mean farrer, they adjusted the pronunciation of further to farther, in order to bring it closer to far. The evidence in the O.E.D. doesn’t support Fowler’s hunch; the dictionary’s editors suspect that a different impulse created the variant. (Their speculation is connected to the verb form of further, and is, trust me, more trouble to explain than it’s worth.) But no matter. Fowler’s hunch seems to me accurate as a reflection of how contemporary English speakers feel about further and farther. Situations arise where the meanings “more ahead” and “more distant” don’t coincide, and in such situations the ghost of forth needs to be exorcised somehow, making it powerfully convenient that farther is farther from forth than further is.

Consider the house, tree, and sunflower in the illustration at the top of this post. The sunflower is farther from the tree than the house is. But it would sound a bit odd to say that the sunflower is further than the house, given that the sunflower lies in the opposite direction. On the other hand, it would be colloquial to say that the sunflower is further from the house than the tree is, because the tree and the sunflower lie in the same direction. A mathematician might say that further is referring to the increase of a vector, and farther to the increase of a distance. To say it in English rather than in math: farther refers to a greater distance, literal or metaphorical, from a shared measuring point. Further refers to a greater progress in a shared direction.

A few examples: If John ran around a one-mile racetrack while Mary was running around a pond with a three-mile circumference, then Mary ran farther than John—but it would sound wrong to say she ran further. If John drove from Brooklyn to New Jersey, and Mary drove from Brooklyn to Philadelphia, then it’s reasonable to say that Mary drove further. (You could also say she drove farther, but in that case you would be signalling that you’re primarily interested in the relative distances they covered and that it doesn’t much matter to you whether they were moving along the same path.) If John was able to carry the Holy Grail only a hundred yards into a primeval forest before expiring, and Mary buckled on her armor and picked up the Grail where it lay, her intent would have to be to carry the Grail further, not farther. In fact, it’s possible for her to carry it further even if she doesn’t carry for as great a distance as John carried it.

The distinction is just as handy in the figurative realm. You can say that the sexual meaning of the Grail was farther from Mary’s medieval mind than it is from our soiled and contemporary own. And you can say that Edward’s investigation of the Grail’s symbolical meanings goes much further than Eugene’s.

Problem solved? Alas, as Fowler grumblingly pointed out, the O.E.D. itself cites some of the greatest writers in English defying the supposed prescription explained here. (As Mary Norris, a query proofreader at The New Yorker and the author of “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,” put it, when I asked her about this distinction, “Etymology doesn’t determine usage.” She added, amiably, “Have fun with the copy editor!”) If it were up to me, “Do what thou wilt” would be the whole of the law, but there’s a finite number of times that you can say that to your copy editor. This is much farther than I expected this blog post to get, and I don’t see how I can go any further with it.