| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
|
3. Word Choice: New Uses, Common Confusion, and Constraints
|
| § 157. help |
| can help. Many people commonly use help in the sense conveyed in the sentence Don’t change it any more than you can help (that is, “any more than you have to"). Others condemn this usage on the grounds that help in this sense means “avoid” and therefore logically requires a negative. But the expression is a well-established idiom. | 1 |
| cannot help / cannot help but. For a discussion of these expressions, see
cannot under Grammar. | 2 |
|
| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
|
|
