Dear Grammer Genious,
My friend and I have been debating over how to refer to something that is smaller than another. Should we say "littler" or "more little?" "Littler" sounds like a bad punk rock band name while "more little" sounds like you have a set amount of little while something else has more of that little. Which is more correct?
-Paul Le Blanc
Dear Dr. Le Blanc,
You have raised several issues that you for sure don’t even know about.
There are three reasons why people don’t like to use the word “littler.” The first is that “little” has two syllables, and when you add an ending to a word it’s supposed to make the word longer, but in this case it doesn’t because you still end up with two syllables, so it seems like you have wasted your time.
The second reason is that to make an adjective comparative by adding “-er” it generally has to have only one syllable – like, “big-bigger” or “fat-fatter”. If it has two syllables it is very hard to add “-er” to it because it gets unwieldy and it sounds funny, and it makes you forget what it was that you were going to say in the first place. Adding a suffix to a THREE-syllable word is of course absurd and out of the question, and doing so marks the writer as a person who is only semi-literate and just doesn’t “get” English, like that hack W. Shakespeare with his anti-English monstrosities like “unworthiest,” etc.
The third and most important reason is that we just have no way in English to express the idea of “smaller.” Mrs. Grammer Genious makes the insightful comment that this doubtlessly explains why English-speaking people tend to be such a bunch of great huge fatties; they can’t conceive of the idea of getting smaller, because there is no word for it in English. This provides us with irrefutable proof of the Whorfian hypothesis.
- The Grammer Genious
No comments:
Post a Comment