Adjectives

“… no more frequent then usual.”

Adjectives, Adverbs, Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Nouns, Prepositions

I heard this recently during a radio broadcast.

Problem:
The word “then” is not a preposition.

Explanation:
The radio broadcaster said a sentence such as “The telephone calls to the radio station during this hour were no more frequent then usual.”

The problem with this sentence is that the word “then” — spelled T-H-E-N — is not a preposition.

Instead, this word is any of the following:

  • adverb, as in “Prices were higher then.”, where “then” means “at that time” in this sentence;
  • adjective, as in “The then president of the club was a nice guy.”, where “then” means “existing” in this sentence;
  • noun, as in “We have not seen a show at the Alley Theatre since then.”, where “then” means “that time” in this sentence.

What the phrase “no more frequent then usual” requires is a preposition, given that the speaker is comparing “more frequent” with “usual”.

The required preposition is “than” — spelled T-H-A-N, not T-H-E-N.

I believe that the common English blunder of using “then” where the preposition “than” is required is due in part to mispronunciation of the preposition “than”, but simple ignorance about these two words certainly could play a part, too.

Solution:
“… no more frequent than usual.”

messiest, messier, messy, less messy, least messy

Adjectives, Outsider's Perspective

I heard someone say “messier” the other day, and it made me wonder about the various versions of the adjective “messy”.

We can say that X is “messy”.

We can compare X to something else and say that X is “messier” than the other.

We can compare X to everything else and say that X is “messiest”.

However, there are no modifiers of the adjective “messy” when going in the other direction.

Instead, we have:

  • X is “less messy” than something else.
  • X is the “least messy” of them all.

I find it interesting that modifiers of adjectives in English do not have this bidirectional symmetry.

I suspect that this asymmetry must give some native speakers of other languages difficulty when they are learning English.

“Coordinate” vs. “Co-ordinate” vs. “Coördinate”

Adjectives, Nouns, Verbs, Versus

I wondered which spelling was correct after recently seeing each one.

Problem:
Each spelling is considered to be correct, but not everyone agrees which among these three spellings is/are correct.

Explanation:
These three words mean the same thing as nouns, they mean the same thing as verbs, and they mean the same thing as adjectives.

The different spellings here represent historical variance.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “coordinate” — spelled C-O-O-R-D-I-N-A-T-E — 52,800,000 matches
  • “co-ordinate” — spelled C-O-HYPHEN-O-R-D-I-N-A-T-E — 5,050,000 matches
  • “coördinate” — spelled C-O-DIAERESIS-O-R-D-I-N-A-T-E — 10,100 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used these three spellings by a compound ratio of 5,228-to-500-to-1.

This compound ratio seems to reflect the evolution of the word. From what I have seen, “coördinate” with an diaeresis-O was the original spelling of the word. This seems to have morphed into “co-ordinate” with no diaeresis but with a hyphen between the first “o” and the second “o”, which seems to have morphed into “coordinate” with no diaeresis and no hyphen.

I believe that evolution of this word is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis. It is simpler to write or type a hyphen than to write or type an diaeresis, and it is simpler to omit the hyphen than to include it.

Solution:
Use any these three spellings of the word, but realize that the most popular spelling today has no hyphen and no diaeresis.