Silly Objections. Now and then some language prig* complains that "there's no such word" as thus or such. Two instances of that came up this past week. In one, someone who disagreed with the disagreeable Ann Coulter, who had said someone or something was the "stupidest", objected that there's no such word as "stupidest". In another, many people criticized President Bush for saying of himself that he is the "decider", again on the ground that "there's no such word".
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Actually, of course, there is indeed such a word as each of "stupidest" and "decider". They both appear in my unabridged dictionary, but would be words even if they were not listed in the dictionary, because English permits the addition of grammatical endings to turn one type of word into another, and such endings can be added to pretty much any word at all.
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-ER and -EST can be added to a great many adjectives to form the comparative and superlative forms, respectively. American Heritage advises:

Adjectives that have one syllable usually take -er and -est. Adjectives that have two syllables and end in y (early), ow (narrow), and le (gentle), can also take -er and -est. Almost all other adjectives with two or more syllables require the use of more and most.

But "stupider" and "stupidest" are shown plainly in my Random House Unabridged. We even have the idiom "ridiculouser and ridiculouser", tho "ridiculouser" is not expressly listed in my electronic dictionaries.
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Nowadays we increasingly hear affected locutions like "I could not have been more clear", instead of "clearer". Such uses are stilted and pretentious, the kind of thing that people who are actually insecure about what is right and wrong say, thinking they are "playing safe", to sound more educated than in fact they are, such as "an historic", an utterly absurd formulation that no intelligent person uses.
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As for the agent suffix -ER (or, sometimes, -OR — which is pronounced as tho written -ER, not like the word "or"), it can be added to pretty much any verb to create a noun that means "one who does" what the verb does.
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If you want to criticize Coulter and/or Bush, there are plenty of valid grounds to do so. Attacking them for saying "stupidest" or "decider" is not a valid ground.
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You can attack Bush for saying "nucular", because there really is no such word as that, tho there is an ignorant mispronunciation of "nuclear" that sounds like that.
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Or you could attack Bush as a liar for pretending he makes decisions, when in fact all important decisions of his Administration are made by the Republican Politburo of which Dubya is just the craggy face.
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* Prig: "a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, esp. in a self-righteous or irritating manner". Random House Unabridged Electronic Dictionary, 1993.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,398.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:41 AM