More Seldom

Here's a little bit of poetry by E.E. Cummings (corrected for punctuation and missing capitals)

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.

i quote it only because there was a question on the Dear Dogberry page as to whether anything could happen more seldom.

Seldom is usually an adverb, like often. So let's have a look:

I often wash.

I wash more often.

Compared to:

I seldom wash.


I wash more seldom.

Oooh no! Can't do that. However, in America seldom is often used as an adjective. In fact, Shakespeare adjectivised it in the sonnets:

Blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

That's how Cummings seems to be using seldom in the poem above, as a straight synonym for rare, not rarely. The line means something like "Waves are very wet, and love is very rare; indeed the rareness of love is greater in extent than the wetness of waves".

However, more still feels awkward when applied to adjectives of diminution. As in:

Alice was more small now.


The pile is more little.

All of which leaves you with two options: you can be very simple, reasonably simple, or extraordinary.

The very simple solution is to replace more seldom with less. So "I washed less".

The reasonably simple is replace more seldom with more rarely. This still has echoes of awkwardness because it sounds like "more small" etc. So if you don't want to be extraordinary, you should just add -er and -est. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did this back in 1748 when she wrote:

Complainers are seldom pity'd, and boasters yet seldomer beleiv'd.

And Mark Twain kicked all common usage out of the door when he wrote that:

The seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile.

And what Montagu, Cummings and Twain have done is seldomly utterly wrong. Here's that poem in full:

Love is more thicker than forget,
More thinner than recall,
More seldom than a wave is wet,
More frequent than to fail.


It is most mad and moonly
And less it shall unbe
Than all the sea which only
Is deeper than the sea.


Love is less always than to win,
Less never than alive,
Less bigger than the least begin,
Less littler than forgive.


It is most sane and sunly,
And more it cannot die
Than all the sky which only
Is higher than the sky.


The only pop song I can think of that contains the word seldom.



P.S. I've written about seldom before here.

Fun, funner, funnest

A few days ago I noticed an ad for "the funnest iPod ever". Despite having gone through a phase of using “funner” and “funnest” when I was young and foolish, I still felt a little pedantic and prickly about Apple using its marketing might to popularise what some still view as a “ghastly”, “grating and horrifying” word. I wonder whether the use of the non-standard superlative was deliberate - possibly to make a banal slogan less banal and more fun - or whether it is entirely unselfconscious: a quotation from Steve Jobs, perhaps, or a reflection of the way people speak in techworld.

A more important question is why "fun" and "funner" should be considered wrong, while almost all other short adjectives ending in a consonant take -er and -est in the comparative and superlative (here is a link to a simple table showing the rules for comparatives and superlatives). WorldWideWords and Grammar Girl (in a response to Steve Jobs' use of the word at a press conference) explain that this is because "fun" was not, historically speaking, an adjective at all, but a noun.

It started being used as an attributive noun (a noun which modifies other nouns) in the nineteenth century, with phrases such as “fun-room”, “funfair” and “fun-fest” creeping into use. It is only recently that it has made the transition to being an adjective, and even now not all dictionaries accept it as one – my online OED only lists it as a noun and a verb (meaning to “make fun or sport”).

As a result, fun is still treated like a noun when forming comparatives and superlatives - so it is "more fun" and the "most fun", like "more sugar" or the "most sugar". Grammar Girl explains it thus:

“Even people who accept that "fun" is an adjective are unlikely to embrace "funner" and "funnest." It seems as if language mavens haven't truly gotten over their irritation that “fun” has become an adjective, and they've decided to dig in their heels against “funner” and “funnest.” In their minds, if “fun” as an adjective is still informal, then the inflected forms are still “nonstandard,” or to use less fussy words—“funnest” is grating and horrifying. And the language mavens still have enough influence to hold the line for now”.

Incidentally, I have noticed that some non-native speakers of English use "funny" as an adjective meaning “fun”, which is entirely logical, in that it does derive from the noun “fun” (and has been around much longer than “fun” as an adjective). However, it always seems to have had the specific sense of “comical”.

On another slightly tangential note, I have noticed that another set of adjectives which don’t seem to follow the normal rules are adjectives of nationality. Words like “French”, “Dutch”, “Greek” and “Swiss” should in theory act like other one-syllable words ending in consonants, but I have never heard anyone use “Frencher” to mean “more French” (as in, “it’s more French to cook that way”, or “this bistro feels more French than the other one”). Does anyone know why this is?

No fun for pedants