When to use farther and when to use further? Tricky one. Farther seems a bit more antiquated to me, with most people deferring to more common, if less logical further.

It turns out that both are fine, though for me you can justify farther when you use it with distance. Saturn is farther from the earth than Jupiter, for example.

I made a quick check of my 600-blog posts, for kicks and giggles, and I use the word farther twice in all of them. A pretty rare occurrence, then, among about 150,000 words. In the one instance I say ‘rippling out your original request in ever farther…’ In the other I’m saying ‘When you’ve got the word ‘have’ in there, it throws it ‘back’ farther to the ‘u’ word.’ Pretty opaque sentences when taken out of context, I know.

Yet both of these are distance-related you could say, rather than the figurative-related, as in ‘I could go further, but I won’t.’