Everything From This to That

My colleague Vanessa Gordon and others have noted our frequent use of what critics call “false ranges.” These constructions generally are framed with phrases like “everything from … to …” or “ranging from … to …” and include two or more disparate items: “The legislation includes everything from stricter bank regulations to new taxes on overseas corporations.”

Judging from how often this idiom appears in our prose, many of our writers and editors obviously have no qualms about it. Other editors, as Vanessa said, take a hard line against the construction, “believing that if a list doesn’t run from high to low, short to tall, past to present, it should not be called a range.”

See full article at http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/everything-from-this-to-that/