Incomparable Adjectives

It’s that’s time again. Time to give ya’ll a lesson in grammar. Oh, how I love grammar and vocabulary. It’s quite a shame I’ll always be regarded as a forgeiner, I’ve always thought of myself as a quite the studio fellow.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

So wrote Charles Dickens in his 1843 classic, “A Christmas Carol.” Setting the stage for his popular tale, he took some humorous editorial liberty by qualifying the incomparable adjective dead and turning it into a superlative.

Of course, we all know that dead is dead. One cannot be more dead than another, let alone the deadest. Dead is finite. It is absolute.

The English language contains a number of absolute or incomparable adjectives that cannot and should not be modified. Like dead, they either are or they are not. There is no in-between.

Here are some of them: unique, perfect, square, round, pregnant, bankrupt, anonymous, complete.

Examples:

Wrong: Harriet’s custom-designed hat was the most unique piece of headwear that I’ve ever seen.
Correct: Harriet’s custom-designed hat was unique.
Correct: Harriet’s custom-designed hat was most peculiar.

One can be slightly peculiar, frightfully peculiar, spectacularly peculiar, etc.; however, one either is unique or is not.

Wrong: Jim got a more perfect score on the college entrance exam than Harry did. (This simply is not possible. One either has or doesn’t have a perfect score.)
Correct: Jim got a perfect score on the college entrance exam.

Wrong: Our home office is the squarest room in the house. (The definition of square is something that has four equal sides. There can be no variance.)
Correct: Our home office is square.

And then there’s a rash of words beginning with in- or un- that also are incomparable.

Examples:

Wrong: The ink in that pen is truly indelible.
Correct: The ink in that pen is indelible.

Again, it either is, or it isn’t.

Wrong: The excuse that Betty gave for being late is somewhat unbelievable.
Correct: The excuse that Betty gave for being late is unbelievable.

You either believe her, or you don’t.

I hope you all learned something from this.

Adieu. Navid.