The Comparative: More or -er?

[Fred Streed]

I ain't no grammatician, all these rules give me a gawddamn headache.

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Fred Streed

I ain't no grammatician, all these rules gives me a gawddamn headache.

Oh, come on. You have no problem. Jeez, if we all wrote like you, we wouldn't have needed to call in the ostrich.

For those who doubt stupider, this dictionary compiler confirms:

stu·pid Audio Help /ˈstupɪd, ˈstyu‑/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[stoo-pid, styoo‑] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation adjective, -er, -est, noun
–adjective
1. lacking ordinary quickness and keenness of mind; dull.

As I recall, there are some that can go either way. But I can't think of any offhand, and could be wrong. Stupid is not one of them: stupider and stupidest are the correct comparative and superlative.

BTW, superlative describes a form of adjectives; it itself is not what it describes. Thus, you cannot say X is a superlative trombone player. You see that often, but it is wrong.

[Brian Stone]

Note that while it commonly means "approximately" in mathematics, it can also mean a negation in logic (~p = not p.)

Depends on who wrote your text book.

I've seen the tilde used to denote NOT-A (~A), but in proof based mathematics and formal logic classes, the NOT-A would be written with a little hooked line in front of it.

I suppose the only reason the tilde has gained currency is because the other symbol isn't on a standard qwerty keyboard. It's an extended acii character (170) that can be appended by pressing alt 170 or is available in some applications like MS Word.

As for the coming pogrom on misspellers and gramatical scofflaws, I hope Strich will be gentle with me. As Joseph Beria once said, "show me the man, and I'll FIND the grammatical flaw!"

Or something like that.

-Brian

[Fred Streed]

Originally Posted by Brian Stone

I've seen the tilde used to denote NOT-A (~A), but in proof based mathematics and formal logic classes, the NOT-A would be written with a little hooked line in front of it...
...As for the coming pogrom on misspellers and gramatical scofflaws, I hope Strich will be gentle with me. As Joseph Beria once said, "show me the man, and I'll FIND the grammatical flaw!"

Or something like that.

-Brian

Misuse a tilde and yer gone, 86ed, kaput! Likewise if you screw up an umlaut, ampersand, asterisk, or apostrophe.

What the hell, it's like I used to tell them down at the ol' Bar 40 Saloon, "I've been kicked out of better dives than this!"

//;=)

[Steve1957]

I always thought that if the word had two or more syllables, you use "more". Of course, there are exceptions. Is "stupid" one of them?
I was curious, so I looked around.


I saw the following and it mentions "stupid". (My comments are enclosed by [ and ] ).

Formation :
-Short adjective => adjective + -er + than
-Long adjective => more + adjective +than

*Adjective + -er:
- Monosyllabic adjectives => -er ( fast/faster)
- 2-syllable adjectives terminated by -y + -er => lucky/luckier- early/earlier
- 2-syllable adjectives terminated by -e , -er, -ow => noble/nobler- clever/cleverer- narrow/narrower
- Adjectives terminated by vowel + consonant = doubling of last letter => fat/fatter
- Some 2-syllable adjectives form can take either form '-er' or 'more'=> clever, narrow, quiet, simple, shallow

More + adjective
- Adjectives with more than 2 syllables => more expensive
- 2-syllable adjectives not terminated by -y, -e, -er, -ow => more pleasant- more useful
- Participative past,1, 2, 3 syllables or more => -more tired- more delighted -
Comparison of 2 attributes always takes 'more'=> more stupid than silly
[From this, it seems that "stupider" cannot always replace "more stupid".]

*adjectives that allow 2 comparative constructions: (-er & more )
- common, cruel, gentle, handsome, likely, mature, narrow, obscure, pleasant, polite, remote, shallow, simple, stupid, subtle-
[From this, it seems that "more stupid" can always replace "stupider".]

- Some adjectives with the prefix '-un' allow 2 constructions as -er or more : unhealthy, unkind, unlikely, unlucky
[Now I wonder about this. I can't see myself using the word "unkinder".]

*Irregular comparatives:
good & well /better- bad & badly/worse- far/farther& further- old/elder
-old => comparatif = 'older' but when you're talking about two members of the same family you use 'the elder'- 'The elder' is never followed by a construction with 'than'. It is used with 'the' or a possessive adjective :
ex: Tom is older than Jack. Tom is my elder son (= my older son)
* Note : You don't say 'He is more ill/iller' => but=> 'He's worse ...or better'
To form the comparative of 'little', we use 'smaller' and not 'littler'.

So, to sum up, I get the impression that "more stupid" is always ok, while stupider may not be.
Personally, I use them both, depending on circumstances.
As for -est, I think I always used "stupidest".

I need to get a life.

[Dan_O]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

~ means about in English. It might have other meanings i'm not familiar with. If it's over an 'n' in spanish, it changes the sound to an 'ny' as in 'canyon.' but that's in spanish.

[ ] brackets. used for editorial comments, to distinguish the editor's words from the author's. of course, also used in math equations. also, if you have parenthetical material in something you're writing and need parentheses inside that, then that nested material is placed between brackets. so: (blah blah blah blah blah [blah blah blah] blah blah blah)

The brackets can also be used in paraphrasing, and also when you only need certain parts of a long quote.

[Sándor Petőfi]

This is a most stupid thread.

Why don't we do something more constructive? A lesson in how the American before English gives us an oxymoron, perhaps?

Your mother is your relation, but your lover and you are in a relationship of which she doesn't approve.

A traffic light alternates between red and green, but if you want to avoid this, there are alternative ways to get about.

You can lay down your hat, but you yourself must lie down next to it.

Good line, but marred by 'more stupid' as opposed to the correct 'stupider.' On the surface it might seem that using the technically incorrect 'more stupid' reinforces the sense of the quotation, 'stupider' is both the correct and it allows the emphasis to fall in the right place.

You're wrong, wrong, wrong. Except for that bit about your not being a first-rate grammarian. You're wrong because I know that the likes of Goldsmith, Shelley, Gibbon, Scott, and - yes - Twain, are not.

The classic form is most stupid. This makes sense for two reasons. The first is that it is in accordance with the traditional rule regarding syllables. The second is that the word has a Latin root, and Latin roots do not like being appended by English forms.

For those who doubt stupider, this dictionary compiler confirms:

stu·pid Audio Help /ˈstupɪd, ˈstyu‑/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[stoo-pid, styoo‑] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation adjective, -er, -est, noun
–adjective
1. lacking ordinary quickness and keenness of mind; dull.

I couldn't care less what a contemporary dictionary has to say, because dictionaries record usage, and since English is now used by every Tom, Dick and Harry from here to a tent in the Sahara, what they record is a language which has been dragged through the back streets and beaten over the head with a stick. If you want to see classic English, that is, English as spoken and written by Englishmen - you know, the blokes who invented the darned lingo - refer to an Oxford dictionary that was compiled at least fifty years ago.

A good indication of the poverty of a language is the poverty of its writers. Can anyone name a contemporary scribbler who can string together two words better than a 19th century preschooler with a crayon could? No, you can't.

BTW, superlative describes a form of adjectives; it itself is not what it describes. Thus, you cannot say X is a superlative trombone player. You see that often, but it is wrong.

You're wrong again. The Oxford dictionary lists a number of other uses, both of the adjective and the noun; they aren't recent either.

b. Exaggerative, hyperbolical. (Cf. B. 1b.)
1588 FRAUNCE Lawiers Logike Ded, To disgrace the one, or advance the other in comparison wise, by superlative woordes, and hyperbolicall amplifications. 1828 MISS MITFORD Village Ser. III. (1863) 7 To all who knew Nelly's opinion of her own doings, this praise appeared superlative. 1906 CHURCHILL Sp. Ho. Comm. 21 Mar., I hope I shall not be drawn..into imitating..the protracted, superlative, and, I think, rather laboured exhibition with which he has occupied the attention of the House.

2. Raised above or surpassing all others; extremely high, great, or excellent; supereminent, supreme. a. Of persons and material things.
c1410 HOCCLEVE Mother of God 9 Modir of mercy,..at of al vertu art superlatyf. 1423 JAS. I Kingis Q. cxcvii, Gowere and chaucere,..Superlatiue as poetis laureate. 1477 EARL RIVERS (Caxton) Dictes 123 The viij. leches..whiche were all .viij. superlatyff aboue all other lechis. 1592 NASHE Strange Newes I iv, Betweene you and me declare..whether you be not a superlatiue blocke, for al you readd the Philosophie Lecture at Cambridge. a1628 F. GREVIL Life of Sidney (1652) 75 A Peer of this Realme,..superlative in the Princes favour. 1630 DEKKER 2nd Pt. Honest Wh. Wks. 1873 II. 170 O euerlasting, supernaturall superlatiue Villaine! 1657 North's Plutarch, Add. Lives (1676) 18 Natural Philosophy, wherein Aristotle was so superlative. 1706 E. WARD Wooden World Diss. (1708) 105 He..allows Newcastle Ale and Salmon to be the most superlative Diet in the Universe. 1838 DICKENS Nich. Nick. xxxiv, You are the demdest, knowing hand,..the cunningest, rummest, superlativest, old fox. 1868 STANLEY Westm. Abbey iii. 124 Its Chapter House, its ornaments..were to be superlative of their kind.

b. Of immaterial things, actions, qualities, etc.
c1550 ROLLAND Crt. Venus I. 760 Thay..Ponderat weill the falt superlatiue. 1610 HOLLAND Camden's Brit. (1637) 256 Queene Elizabeth,..worthy of superlative praise. 1625 BACON Ess., Viciss. Things, Superlatiue and Admirable Holinesse of Life. 1647 N. BACON Disc. Govt. Eng. I. lii. (1739) 93 Reason of State, which as the times then were, was evident and superlative. 1665 WITHER Lord's Prayer Preamb., This superlative Form of Prayer. 1762 FALCONER Shipwr. III. 115 Thy state..Gain'd, like thine arms, superlative applause. 1798 S. & HT. LEE Canterb. T. II. 27 Miss Archer's advice she treated with superlative contempt. 1878 R. B. SMITH Carthage 189 This religious mission he..carried out to the best of his superlative ability.

2. A person or thing surpassing all others of the class or kind; one who or a thing which is supereminent or supreme; the highest example (of a quality). Now rare, and with allusion to sense 1.
1600 W. WATSON Decacordon (1602) 359 Amongst the most famous preachers in Rome..three were..all superlatiues in a different kind. c1645 HOWELL Lett. (1688) IV. 433 This..is the best of all, and may be called the Superlatif of the three. 1777 SHERIDAN Sch. Scandal, To Mrs. Crewe 38 Nature's best and heaven's superlative. 1885 W. F. CRAFTS Sabbath for Man (1895) 188 The so-called Christians who sanction these Sunday parties are the superlatives of hypocrisy. 1903 Westm. Gaz. 17 Sept. 5/2, I sell bread here made from best ‘London whites’ and ‘superlatives’ at 6d. per loaf.

3. The highest or utmost degree of something; the height, acme. Usually with allusion to sense 1.
1583 B. MELBANCKE Philotimus Ffij, The prince of whome I speake, is in the Positiue degree of her Superlatiue. 1589 PUTTENHAM Engl. Poesie I. vii. (Arb.) 29 Monasticall men then raigning al in their superlatiue. 1623 MASSINGER Dk. Milan III. iii, Dearest lady,..Make a superlative of excellence In being greatest in your saving mercy. 1653 R. SANDERS Physiogn. Moles 4 The superlative of his good fortunes shall be in Merchandizing. a1687 WALLER On Divine Poesy I. 24 What mortal can with heav'n pretend to share In the superlatives of wise, and fair? 1837 CARLYLE Fr. Rev. I. v. ix, So many highest superlatives achieved by man are followed by new higher; and dwindle into comparatives and positives!

[Troy Alexander]

Originally Posted by Sándor Petőfi

to an Oxford dictionary that was compiled at least fifty years ago.

name a contemporary scribbler who can string two words together better than a 19th century preschooler with a crayon could? No, you can't.



.

Schools use to specialise in prose writing. But nowadays we have other shit to worry about like computers. It is the same reason why there are no decent potters anymore. We cannot cram it all in.

However, there is hope. With the demise of the print media, you will have to be a damn good writer for people to read your shit.

[Myles]

The Oxford Dictionary confirms 'stupider' is indeed a word, although it does sound a bit clunky IMHO.

[Joe Snuffy]

Does anyone know if shitskin is one word or do I put a space between shit and skin?

[Bassanio]

A good indication of the poverty of a language is the poverty of its writers. Can anyone name a contemporary scribbler who can string together two words better than a 19th century preschooler with a crayon could?

A good indication of the poverty of a culture is the poverty of its artists.

The bourgeoisie were buying up Bouguereau and Alma-Tadema's paintings in the late 19th century, thinking that in the coming century their names would rank with the old masters and their paintings would fetch a similar price.

Not in their wildest, most depraved and degenerate dreams could they have foreseen that in a mere two decades a urinal would be worth more than any Bouguereau on the market.


Art for the Jew's sake: a century of Judeo-Aestheticsm can have some adverse effects on a society.

[Brian Stone]

Alex

Captain Queeg wants to know where his dammed strawberries are!

-Brian

[Vonbluvens]

Originally Posted by Myles

The Oxford Dictionary confirms 'stupider' is indeed a word, although it does sound a bit clunky IMHO.

The word 'stupider' just rolls off the tongue without much effort.

Sorry, it may be correct grammar, but it really sounds stupid coming out of the mouth.


I see the need for proper spelling, but to take it to this level?

[Vonbluvens]

Originally Posted by Brian Stone

Alex

Captain Queeg wants to know where his dammed strawberries are!

-Brian

That was pretty damn funny.

I wonder if he rolls steel ball-bearings in between his fingers too.

Rep coming your way.

[William Burcker]

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-fun1.htm

[Q] From Gary Claassen in the USA: “Why can we not say funner and funnest? There are other one-syllable adjectives we can add -er and -est to, such as close (closer and closest) and hot (hotter and hottest). What is it about fun that would make this impossible?”

[A] Interesting question. Fun has conventionally been said to be a noun, so that you can’t make these comparative or superlative forms from it.

But it’s often difficult to work out exactly what job a word is doing in an English sentence, because it’s so easy to shift about between using a word as a straight noun, as in “the television is on”, and using it to modify another noun, as in “the television show has finished”. In the second case — what grammarians refer to as an attributive use — we know that television is a noun because it turns up in other situations. But if it didn’t, we might just as well decide that it’s an adjective, as it’s doing the same job as an adjective. Because this is so easy to do in English, over time words sometimes shift roles. Fun is a good example; it has moved away from being just a noun to being equally comfortable in an adjectival role.

Fun has long been used attributively, as in this is a fun game, in a way that’s no different from saying this is a card game, in which card is certainly a noun (at least, that’s true in writing; in speech subtle differences in stress on the two elements give hints of the relationship between them). Examples are recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary from the nineteenth century that use fun in this attributive way, such as “There was a room at Holly House called the ‘fun-room’, without chair or table”. But other examples in the OED from about the same period look decidedly adjectival, such as “Fun jottings; or, Laughs I have taken pen to” from 1853. In 1876 Mark Twain had Huckleberry Finn say in Tom Sawyer: “Tom — honest injun, now — is it fun or earnest?” where fun certainly looks like an adjective because it’s paired with earnest.

This process has accelerated greatly in the past fifty years. The result is that you regularly come across expressions like this party is fun, it’s really fun, we’re going to have a fun time tonight, that game was more fun than the last one, where the distinction between noun and adjective is decidedly blurred (some of these go back a long way in American and British English, especially regionally; I’m happy to use all of them myself, though that view is not shared by everyone). It’s also possible to use fun with verbs such as remain and seem that don’t usually allow nouns to appear after the verb (this seems fun).

Once this process got well under way, people started to say things like how fun is it?, and it’s very fun. The move to adjective has gone so far in the USA that its comparative and superlative are not infrequently found in informal writing: funner for ‘more fun’ and funnest for ‘most fun’ (“basketball is funner than football, and soccer is the funnest game of all”). A scan of newspapers in the NEXIS database from 1998 found over a thousand examples of the latter form. Some of these are no doubt intended to be humorous, and some are probably mistakes, but surely not all of them are.

What we’re seeing here is language evolution in action. So the straightforward answer to your question is: yes, you can use these forms, and people are doing so increasingly often. But if your question was really asking whether it is acceptable to use them in all circumstances, then I have to say firmly that, no, it isn’t, not yet anyway. They are definitely informal and they should still be avoided when speaking or writing standard or formal English.

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Sándor Petőfi

You're wrong, wrong, wrong. Except for that bit about your not being a first-rate grammarian. You're wrong because I know that the likes of Goldsmith, Shelley, Gibbon, Scott, and - yes - Twain, are not.

In fact, I am not wrong, I am right, and what's more, your ear is tin as a can.

Stupider is infinitely preferable to more stupid, which sounds stupid. Most stupid is even stupider sounding than more stupid.

I don't ever recall seeing 'more stupid' in Twain, and I don't think you can produce an example.

[Mike in Denver]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

In fact, I am not wrong, I am right, and what's more, your ear is tin as a can.

Stupider is infinitely preferable to more stupid, which sounds stupid. Most stupid is even stupider sounding than more stupid.

I don't ever recall seeing 'more stupid' in Twain, and I don't think you can produce an example.

Styles of speech and writing change with time and not always for the better. Here is part of a poem by Gerald Massey, written in 1884:

Gerald Massey -- Poems and Ballads (page 82)

They were three Spirits fresh from God's own hand,
And beautifuller ne'er took mortal mould.

---
Now we read, “more pretty,” “more lovely,” and “more stupid.” It seems to be working backwards through the number of syllables. How soon before we read “more big” and “more tall”? How long before these forms are commoner?



Mike

[Alex Linder]

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. There is something inherently comical about -er. It's not for every comparative, but when in doubt, I go with it. The movie wasn't "Dumb and More Dumb," it was "Dumb and Dumberer." The more -ers you add, the funnier it gets.

[Mike Jahn]

Originally Posted by Alex Linder

Yes, that's what I'm talking about. There is something inherently comical about -er. It's not for every comparative, but when in doubt, I go with it. The movie wasn't "Dumb and More Dumb," it was "Dumb and Dumberer." The more -ers you add, the funnier it gets.

Is that the only reason you like it? When I think about it I can see how when it becomes two words instead of one it weakens the impact.

For example, if you had an argument with a girlfriend and you said:

"You are the most bitchy woman I've ever known!"

compared to

"You are the bitchiest woman I've ever known!"


The second statement packs more punch!

Am I right?

[Alex Linder]

Originally Posted by Mike Jahn

Is that the only reason you like it? When I think about it I can see how when it becomes two words instead of one it weakens the impact.

For example, if you had an argument with a girlfriend and you said:

"You are the most bitchy woman I've ever known!"

compared to

"You are the bitchiest woman I've ever known!"


The second statement packs more punch!

Am I right?

Yes.

It's in keeping with the streamlining and rounding of corners to use 'more' rather than '-er,' which has been the trend for the last twenty years.