AboutTed Nesbitt Expertise I am the bibliographic instruction and reference librarian at a public college. Some members of the English department recommend me to their students. I offer assistance in grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and paragraph development. My master`s thesis concerns William Faulkner`s tragic novels. I formerly taught advanced placement English at two schools in the Philadelphia area.
Question A friend made a post on a message board saying that someone was "Stupider" than someone else... and reading it, I thought the proper way to express that would be to use "More stupid".
Apparently "Stupider" is a word according to dictionary.com, but is "more stupid" also correct?
Thanks for your time & help!
-Eric AiXeLsyD
eric@aixelsyd.com
Answer Eric:
Ther are many words in the dictionary that I would avoid. "Stupider" is one of them. Just pronouncing it is awkward.
You, however, are RIGHT on target. The preferred way of expressing this idea is "more stupid."
"The Heath Handbook" has a list of the preferred comparative and superlative forms of adjectives and adverbs. The handbook's rule of thumb is that, if a word is one syllable, use "er" and "est," as in "tall, taller, and tallest."
But . . . "Many adjectives of two syllables and all longer adjectives form the comparative and superlative by adding "more" and "most."
Examples: alert more alert most alert
ambitious more ambitious most ambitious
I suppose your friend would choose "alerter" and "alertest," but he would be in a "peculiar" minority.
Have him try to pronounce "ambitiouser" and "ambitiousest."
