comma/more superior

Jesus Christ Almighty, FBM, you've found a prescriptivist and you think that the crap he writes describes how language works.



So first this joker says that "Double negatives cancel each other", then in the very next breath he merely says it's redundant.

First, there's isn't a native speaker in the world who thinks that a speaker who says, "I never did nothing", is actually saying "I did something".



What a crock of ****! How long did you comb the Net until you found this bullshit site?

How is,

(c) superlatives as vague intensifiers

"She is the sweetest girl" any different than "the sweetest girl I know".

The first has some words elided.

I love it when JTT comes out swinging.

But you're wrong, dude, in this core point: "more superior" is wrong.

JTT is the first, and to date, only person on any forum I've ever put on 'Ignore'. The only way I know what s/he says is when someone else quotes him/her.

When I was googling around, I found a few examples of people saying 'more superior', sure. Guess what? 90% of them were ESL/EFL students. The other 10% didn't show much in the way of grammar skills, either.

A few people say 'more superior'; they're making an error when they do. Native speakers make mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes become fossilized. Just because a few people habitually say/write it doesn't make it correct. To wit: nuke-you-lurr.

I have to agree that native speakers can perpetuate dubious usages. To point out something i've already pointed out (tediously), i left "more superior" standing in the original post on the rule of thumb i have of altering as little of what an ESL student writes as possible.

However, i would be at pains to point out to you just how idiotic it is to rely on Google as a source for language usage. The member JTT has attempted to use that method in the past, and i justifiably laughed at it. You don't know if the person from whom the quoted usage was extracted is a native speaker. You don't know how much education the person from whom the quoted usage was extracted has had. But the most important point is a statistical one: you don't know how many iterations of a usage are simply quotes of or repetitions of a usage from someone about whose language skills you know nothing.

Consider, for example: "All of your base are belong to us!" Based on merely a Google search, that should be prime Queen's English. Google returned 793,000 hits in two tenths of a second.

I agree about leaving as much of the Ss' work untouched as possible. In my writing classes, if I'm teaching about articles (a, an, the), subject-verb agreement or coherence in an essay, I would only correct errors related to what I was teaching at that time and let the others go. I tell my Ss that I am doing so, and that they shouldn't assume that everything I don't mark is correct. If many students have the same error, even if it's unrelated to the current lesson, I just take a few minutes aside and explain it as an 'extra'. They appreciate that approach.

Google can lead you to Harvard, NASA or the CIA. It can also link you to some loudmouthed know-it-all with a high school education. With experience, it's not so hard to discern the meat from the trash.

Google can be used as a corpus. As such, it's more reliable than Wiki, as a corpus isn't based on opinion, only frequency of usage. I googled 'more superior'. Try it. How many links do you get taking you to examples of it being used by language professionals or, for that matter, native speakers of English? If it were a widely-acceptable phrase, it should appear in journalism, marketing, political speeches, commentaries, peer-reviewed journals, etc. However, what do you get?

The main problem I had was in finding a source - any source - that specifically cited 'more superior' (out of the uncountable number of other possible double-comparative errors) in relation to a grammar lesson. I found two. Once is about 100 years old, and the other is http://www.iolani.org/home.htm Given the time span, it seems pretty clear that 'more superior' has been considered an error by grammarians for longer than any of us has been alive.

No, the Iolani School isn't the OED. If pressed, I could look into how I might access the OED, but to be honest, I probably won't.

The problem i have with Google is statistical. You can get hundreds of thousands or even millions of hits. Do you actually intend to suggest that you check enough of them to separate the wheat from the chaff? To judge who speaks with an educated voice, and who doesn't? Most of all, do you inspect every one of hundreds of thousands of hits to eliminate quotes or repetitions of a usage?

That's about the silliest method i can think of, unless you're only getting a few dozen hits, and can inspect every hit you've gotten.

Have you googled 'more superior'? You don't get hundreds of thousands of hits. That's my point.

The OED doesn't do grammar, as far as i know. They are a thoroughly researched, source, though--and with all true scholarship, they provide quotes for the usages, to that if one wishes, one can verify for oneself, and have a gander at context.

Sure, that's fine. My point was a general one, and that is that Google usually returns so many hits on a usage as to be meaningless. I also made a point earlier with the reference to "all of your base are belong to us." While that is an extreme example, nonetheless, something which has "gone viral" online could entail thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of repetitions of something of a dubious provenance. That, the statistical reason, is the biggest drawback to using a search engine to verify usage.

It are much more betterer.

The last time I looked at the OED, it gave extensive examples of acceptable uses, as well as colloquialisms, collocations, slang, idioms even common errors for virtually each entry.

We cool?

OK, fine . . . i see that. I don't believe it would be proper to say that they provide grammatical explications, though. By the way, i believe i heard that they're going to abandon the print version. To bad--given the choise between reading something on a monitor, and holding a book in my hand, i always prefer to hold the book in my hand.

True that. Except that I can't figure out how to enlarge the font in the books! I press everwhere and nothing works!

It are called a magnifying glass.

I’ll withdraw convention and use conventional usage instead. I don’t believe the sole reason you are more comfortable with far/vastly superior is because it’s commonly used in your neck of the woods.

Have you tried pressing ctrl and the +sign?

That usually works for me.

~~~~
Edit: Oh! Never mind.

I've tried glasses, but they keep running out of power and I can't figure out how to replace the dadblamed batteries.

If you think you've settled on the term you want, Joe, my question remains, and I'll add one more;

How does conventional usage figure into this?



You're mistaken, because I don't have a problem with it, as I've already stated. It's grammatical, it's in common use, although this isn't a terribly important consideration, so why would I avoid it other than I have other collocations that are more familiar to me.

I don't use 'might could' because it isn't part of my dialect, though I do use 'shouldn't oughta'. However, I can't really think of a situation where I would use 'shouldn't oughta' in my writing because it isn't something that fits my or anyone else's writing, unless I were, say, to write a novel, or I suppose I might use it in an email.

And that wasn't the sole reason. I mentioned that it was impossible for me to state conclusively whether I had ever used it in writing, or speech for that matter.

Well, from my perspective, either term worked, though I looked up convention after you enquired and decided that “rule, principle or standard” might have ruffled you, so I modified it. I actually thought that “conventional usage” summed up your point about it being more common to your ear.

If you are trying to understand, Joe, you shouldn't be concerned about ruffling my feathers. But you still haven't answered my questions.

As we stand no one has shown it to be ungrammatical; it isn't. No one has come up with any "rule, principle or standard" that would deny its use. The best anyone has done is make a suggestion that it is redundant; you, I believe, said that it was unnecessary.

But it's not for you or me or anyone to decide how one emphasizes their language. These are personal choices, are they not?