Consult Me is a wonderful book, a kind of Victorian Wikipedia, with entries of varying usefulness for everything from Abdominal Ruptures to Yorkshire Pudding. The entry for Errors in Speech gives a short introduction to the language peeves of that era, some mystifying, some still very familiar today…

Now, call me a pedant, but “3+4″ is not the same as “5+2″. If someone asks for 3 shirts and 4 skirts and you bring them 5 shirts and 2 skirts, you’ve made a mistake. Whoever wrote this question was writing with a blinkered maths-testing point of view rather than with a human point of view, yet trying to use everyday words. If you’re expecting a maths answer you should use a maths word: “equals”.

Language Log is discussing what the rules are for how we form the comparative and superlative of adjectives, or, I should say, which adjectives use the inflectional -er and -est, and which use the periphrastic “more”. Grammar books do explain this, and so do various internet sites, although some of the latter have rather dubious explanations. But Professor Zwicky is more interested in those adjectives where there is a dispute. A typical example is “tired”. I find it unremarkable to use the word “tireder”, but many people complain that it’s wrong, and many people who use it worry that they’re making a mistake.

My point of view is that, no matter what the idiomatic form is (and, clearly, people learning English need to learn idiomatic English), no-one should be criticised for making a comparative or superlative “mistake”. After all, it’s not as if the hearer or reader does not understand the meaning of “more nice” or “beautifuller”.

What about “more nicer”? Well, I baulk a little at it, just as I do at double negatives, but it’s common enough in slang parlance, and, again, it’s not at all ambiguous.

In response to Prof. Zwicky’s request, I’ve googled a few disputed inflectionals, as follows:

closeder
- You have a mind that is closeder than anything I can recall
- By the way, closeder is not a word
http://bit.ly/84QqyN

Non-native speakers discuss whether it’s possible to say “fuller”: http://bit.ly/4mTpD1

Moderner Warfare – Is moderner even a real word
http://midnightmultiplayer.blogspot.com/2008/05/call-of-duty-5-moderner-warfare.html

moderner…(woah, moderner is a word? Ok, spellchecker, if you say so..
http://bit.ly/8BMSDI

I’d forgotten about this: some people use “viewn” instead of “viewed”. This is, I assume, by analogy with “seen”. The fact that it looks weird doesn’t seem to put people off.

Using (the very flaky!) Google Groups Search, the first appearance on Usenet appears to be:

Viewn from a technical standpoint, I know it is still quite hard to create a rather simple “alternative” (alt.) newsgroup

“Pete”, 7 January 2001

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/alt.support.eating-disord/msg/5e953f81f75bc0b9

Pete has an Austrian email address, and if you read the rest of the post it’s clear he’s not a native English speaker. Another writer from Austria, Christian, wrote on 1st October:

Habe bis jetzt nur einen [jpg-Bildbetrachter] gefunden und der war leider Shareware Bräuchte nur was zum viewn, Bearbeitung ist mir egal.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/de.comp.sys.handhelds.psion/msg/28302d67243acb17

Taking these two messages together, it would seem that viewn originated as a Germanised infinitive. (All German infinitives end in -(e)n.)

“Mr Y”, writing from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wrote on 18 March 1993:

Often you will hear “computer nerds” or hackers use hybrids like “viewen“, “listen”, or “compressen”; these are, however, no real German words.

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/soc.culture.german/msg/6a3587d566806008?hl=en

Indeed, on 11 August 1992, Henning Sauer had written:

Im Handbuch steht glaube ich drin das dieser Monitor hauptsaechlich fuer DTP gedacht ist und dafuer und fuer das viewen von DVI-Files ist er bestens geeignet!

http://groups.google.co.uk/group/de.comp.sys.amiga.misc/msg/abf23f63667b01c7

The past participle is geviewt, and this is first seen on 30 January, 2001:

Diese können z.B. mit einem BrowserPlugIn (Cosmoplayer) oder externer Software geviewt und vermessen werden.

http://ww3.cad.de/foren/ubb/Forum55/HTML/000009.shtml

It would be natural for “Pete”, when translating “geviewt” into English, to think the correct form is “viewn”.

So, to return to the hunt for early native-speaker examples, there’s

how to search files that cannot be viewn in disk

(the label given to a thread at Computing.net, dated by Google as 2 September 2002)

http://www.computing.net/answers/windows-xp/files-that-cannot-be-defragmented/38705.html

?, 23 July 2003:

If you have viewn these statistics, then I would be really interested in you restating them here

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=78105

“Khelder”, 1 July 2006

The controversial phrase is “Deutsches Vaterland”, which can be viewn as meaning that Germany was the origin of the human race.

http://community.lionhead.com/forums/post/2057427.aspx

We’ve got to 2006 (the date of Scott Kolp’s post on the subject, which is where we came in) and only got a handful of examples, from foreigners, geeks and, er, reactionaries. So I turned instead to (the even flakier) Google Books Search and hit paydirt:

Johan Åkerman’s 1960 book “Theory of Industrialisation” contains no less than three uses of “viewn”.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=aWsIAQAAIAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=1EK9SojFFYeCygSOotS6Dw

The book was published in Sweden, by Gleerup of Lund, but someone must’ve proof-read it, someone who thought “viewn” was an English word. No wonder, for the next hit takes us right back to Victorian England.

“Southampton considered as a Resort for Invalids” by Edwin Wing (1848), page 22-23:

…as we have now seen that Southampton deserves a high reputation for health, it can well afford the darker side to be viewn…

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3jMEAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA23&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=sEW9So3XJaO4ywTRgtW3Dw

And there’s more…

Jan J. Koenderink, in Liliana Albertazzi (ed.) “Unfolding Perceptual Continua” (John Benjamins, Amsterdam/New York, 2002), p107:

Rows of characters are viewn from a distance.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=baGkbSjdg0sC&pg=PA107&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=gEe9SqnzLp6SygTo4sW-Dw

Herwig Hauser (University of Innsbrueck), in “Singularities” (Birkhaeuser, Basel, 1998), page 293:

… R can be viewn as a formal power series ring in n variables over K.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gviM1ZiCsDYC&pg=PA293&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=yEi9St3_IpDWygSkvPnMDw

?, Expert Systems in Production Engineering (Springer, 1987) page 172:

… extended semantical networks can be viewn as description … of interrelations among project qualities …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=grQmAAAAMAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=Vky9SpWICo7ayASvqPTNDw

?, Euro ASIC 91, (IEEE, 1991) page 175:

… the two corresponding adjacent segments are viewn as a single segment.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LN9VAAAAMAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=hk29Sq_2M6XEzgSewfjIDw

Nordenson, Finney, Bradfield, Bradfield (trans.) “Constitutional Documents of Sweden” (Swedish Rijksdag, 1981) page 18:

… the distribution of the seats totally viewn will become proportional to the number of votes …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=w6zGAAAAIAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=Vk69Sv_oMJu-ygSZ7djbDw

Proceedings of the ASCA Annual Meeting (2001):

… the viewn monocular eye was at the apex …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9E5QAAAAMAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=llC9SsywLI2-zATtxunLDw

Claude Teancum Barnes “The Wending Year” (1941) p 100:

On planet Mars beyond the fulgent moon,

Within the deep and cloudless sky of night,

Perhaps from mountain there the earth is viewn, …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=STtdGKN_FUQC&q=%22Within+the+deep+and+cloudless+sky+of+night,%22

Brita Alroth, “Opus Mixtum” (1994) page 80:

This woman is shown in profile and turned towards her frontally-viewn companion.

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=TXpmAAAAMAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=D1O9SsOHH4O0zASR4-3EDw

Revue internationale du trachome et des maladies oculaires des pays tropicaux et sub-tropicaux (1952) p 33:

When viewn from the standpoint of age the incidence is higher in groups 7 to 14, …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQ4HAQAAIAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=D1O9SsOHH4O0zASR4-3EDw

Taniguchi Kōgyō Shōreikai, “History of Psychiatry” (1982) page 159:

The k’uang Madness Disorder is viewn as an agitated variety of the same disorder, …

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=j_vOAAAAMAAJ&q=viewn&dq=viewn&lr=&ei=1FW9Ssz_JYO0zASR4-3EDw

Buchholz, Richard, Aliabadi, “Advances in Fracture and Damage Mechanics” (2003), page 346:

2-D projection of the Voronoi tessellation plasticity models can not be viewn as material specific parameters in the classical sense …

Like that last one, there were a couple more that Google promises to show, only to chop off the relevant part.

Often there doesn’t seem to be much logic to the idiomatic use of prepositions in English, and sometimes English uses a different preposition from other languages. So it’s not surprising that there’s quite a bit of variation in usage. Language Log is currently revisiting bored with/of/by and I recently spat out my cornflakes over “appreciate of”, but I thought I’d take a look at excited about/for. On Language Log, Mike Kelly comments:

What does sound odd to me… is my kids’ use of “excited for” where I would use “excited about,” e.g, “I’m excited for Thursday,” “I’m excited for the game,” I’m excited for having a day off.”

According to Google, a lot of people were/are excited about The Sims 3:

“excited about (The) Sims 3″ 122,000

“excited for (The) Sims 3″ 100,000

“excited with (The) Sims 3″ 160

“excited by/of (The) Sims 3″ 1 apiece

“excited at/to (The) Sims 3″ nil

To an oldie like me, “excited for” means something different from “excited about” (Compare happy about and happy for), but never mind: another useful distinction has kicked the bucket. A few more comparisons:

“excited about Twitter” 327

“excited for Twitter” 8

“excited about Myspace” 47

“excited for Myspace” 7

“excited about Facebook” 230

“excited for Facebook” 16

“excited about the wedding” 818 “…marriage” 209

“excited for the wedding” 838 “…marriage” 19

“excited about the couple” 54

“excited for the couple” 69

The latter comparison is somewhat different from the others because it has been more usual to be excited for people than about them. I can test that with some Google hit ratios:

excited about/for it 58:8

excited about/for that 28:7

excited about/for her 14:6

excited about/for him 8:4.5

excited about/for us 8:6

p.s. Hey, Google, your hit counts are STILL broken. When are you ever going to fix them??

“The individual did not avail himself of the opportunity – in fact, he has ignored our proffers,” quoth Tom Allensworth about the alleged Avsim hacker.

The noun “proffer” was a surprise. The verb “proffer” is a bit arch (just like “quoth” and the adjective “arch”) but I know it and use it. The noun appears to be a legal term, and more commonly seen in the US than in the UK, judging by Google hit counts.

If the Wikipedia entry is anything to go by, Mr Allensworth was not using the word in its legal sense.

In The Independent, David McKittrick writes:

“All but a handful of Catholic families now remain in the village of Ahoghill, …”

Of course he means “Only…now remain” or “All but…have now left”, but “all but” is one of those phrases that can get your verbal knickers in a twist.

I’m a fan of a certain TV show, and I was struck by the online headline of a Times article on 16th April: “Paula and Noorul showed up on The Apprentice“. Oh dear. Could The Times be running their headlines through some naff commercially available grammar checker?

There’s been some discussion lately about British headline-writing, and the place that most webusers come into contact with it is at the BBC News site. There’s a particularly bad example on there today: Army attack “brutal” (also Army attack “Brutal and cowardly”), which appears to mean the exact opposite of what took place.