930. How YOU doin? Today we’re going to MacGyver up some fun memories and tips. And then we'll look at the rules about using "more" and "most" or "-er" and "-est." It'll be a yowlie howlie good time!
930. How YOU doin? Today we’re going to MacGyver up some fun memories and tips. And then we'll look at the rules about using "more" and "most" or "-er" and "-est." It'll be a yowlie howlie good time!
| Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/tv-language/transcript
| The "TV language" segment was written by Susan K. Herman, a retired U.S. Government multidisciplined language analyst, analytic editor, and language instructor.
| The "more or most" segment was written by Bonnie Mills who has been a copy editor since 1996.
| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.
| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing courses.
| HOST: Mignon Fogarty
| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) or https://sayhi.chat/grammargirl
| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.
| Theme music by Catherine Rannus.
| Grammar Girl Social Media Links: YouTube. TikTok. Facebook. Instagram. LinkedIn. Mastodon.
How YOU doin? Today we’re going to MacGyver up some fun memories and tips.
Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. This week, we look at all the ways TV has influenced our language and tell you the secret rule for when to use “more” and “most” versus “suffixes.”
Influence of TV on Colloquial English
by Susan Herman
New expressions are introduced into our everyday language all the time. And the more we use them, the more they become ingrained in our speech throughout the generations. And because we spend so much time watching TV, it's a huge contributor to how we use language. In fact, according to Nielsen, we in the U.S. are watching more TV than ever — an average of 153 hours every month. So it’s not surprising that many words, phrases, and even speech patterns from TV have made their way into our day-to-day language.
Some of these words and expressions are completely made up by our favorite TV characters (or more accurately, the writers behind them). Think “d’oh,” from “The Simpsons,” or “friend zone” from “Friends." In other cases, the show itself inspired a word, the way the 1980s and 1990s TV show "MacGyver," which featured an incredibly resourceful secret agent who seemed like he could fix almost anything with duct tape, led to "MacGyver" being used as a verb, as in, "Hold on, and I'll MacGyver that broken chair."
And other times, a TV show popularized the use of an existing word in a new way, as is likely the case for “Googling” things. Although “Googling” goes back to 1998, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” gave it a big boost when Willow used it in a 2002 episode. It is supposedly the first time the word was used as a verb on TV, and it was so new, they actually had to explain what it meant!
The thing is, some of these expressions have become so ingrained in our language that we start to think they’ve been around forever and forget where they came from.
According to “How Stuff Works,” there are several different ways in which we use language from TV.
Jargon
The first is jargon, which the website defines as “the language used by a specific group or profession.” How many medical and legal dramas are on TV now? And how much have we picked up from them? For example, how many “Grey’s Anatomy” fans started using the word “stat” to mean “right now”?
And what about “sports speak”? TV sports announcers — and sports in general – have popularized expressions like “bench warmer,” “out of bounds,” and “throwing in the towel.” These terms all have literal meanings in sports, but they are also used figuratively in our everyday language. For example, “Bringing that up in the meeting was ‘out of bounds’” or “I’ve had enough of this project. I’m ‘throwing in the towel.’”
Speech patterns and dialects
TV also has had an effect on our speech patterns and dialects. Ever since the “Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” cartoon in the 1960s, sinister villains have had Eastern European accents and dialects. Think of Gru from “Despicable Me” and “Minions” (which is being turned into a TV series, by the way). This also includes U.S. English dialects. For example, have you ever given your friends a long, drawn-out, “Hellllllooooooo!,” made popular by “Seinfeld,” or imitated the guys from “The Sopranos” with “fuhgeddaboudit’? (And by the way, "fuhgeddaboudit," was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2016. The first use they found goes all the way back to 1987 in the book "Bonfire of the Vanities," by Tom Wolfe.)
Catch phrases
Next, if you've ever imitated Joey from “Friends” with “How YOU doin’?" or used the "Star Trek" line that "resistance is futile," you've peppered your speech with a TV catch phrase. You probably know that “meh” means “so-so” or “whatever,” but do you know where it came from? Well, it’s probably from Yiddish, but it made its way into popular American English in a 1994 episode of “The Simpsons.” And “Seinfeld” comes up again too with catch phrases that are now common including “double-dip,” “low-talker,” and “regifting.” We often use these catch phrases to fit in with others or just to be funny.
Slang
Next, plenty of slang words have found their way into our collective language through TV. For example, Ashton Kutcher's MTV show popularized the word “punk’d” to mean "tricked." And we all know — and hate — “spam,” which actually comes from a 1970 episode of “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” set in a café where a waitress recites a list of menu items, each one with an increasing amount of the canned meat Spam. All the Viking patrons start singing the word until it’s all that can be heard. According to "Business Insider," in the '80s and '90s, users began to inundate chat rooms with lyrics from the “Spam” song. The term “spamming” became popular and now refers to the dreaded practice of sending unsolicited messages or advertisements to lots of people. Ugh!
Acronyms
Lastly, TV has given us lots of acronyms. Most of us know what WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) and the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) — we know what these are from watching the news. If you happen to watch “Jersey Shore” (we won’t tell!), you also know what GTL means (gym, tan, laundry). And we now know crime scene investigators as “CSIs,” thanks to the franchise of the same name, just like we know about MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital) units from the popular show from the ‘70s and early ‘80s.
What’s fascinating is that these boob-tube words and phrases have become so commonplace in our day-to-day language that we don’t even have to think about them. Whether we hear them ourselves while "Netflixing and chilling” or just hear others using them, we can figure out their meaning. The more they’re used, the more they become a part of our language, and hence our culture. That is the power of TV. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
That segment was written by Susan Herman, a retired U.S. Government multidisciplined language analyst, analytic editor, and language instructor.
‘More’ and ‘Most’ versus ‘-Er’ and ‘-Est’
by Bonnie Mills
When you want to modify a noun, is it OK to stick a “more” or a “most” in front (or a “less” or a “least”)? Well, no, not always. Let’s take a look at adjectives first. Adjectives, such as “tall,” “squeaky,” “careful,” and “extraordinary,” describe nouns. There are two ways to make a comparison with an adjective: you can use “more” or “most” in front of the adjective (for example, "more wonderful"), or you can use the suffixes “-er” and “-est” on the end of the adjective (for example, "squeakier"). For the most part, which way you choose depends on how many syllables the adjective has.
Comparisons involving adjectives with one syllable or three syllables or more follow clear-cut rules, whereas the situation is different for adjectives with two syllables.
One-syllable adjectives
One-syllable adjectives use the suffixes “-er” or “-est” on the end of the adjective. For example, “tall” has one syllable, so, if you wanted to compare the height of your family members, you might say, “I am taller than my sister, but I’m not the tallest in the family.” It would sound odd to say, “I am more tall than my sister, but I’m not the most tall in the family.”
Irregular one-syllable adjectives
There are exceptions for some irregular one-word adjectives, though, such as “good” and “bad.” You say, “better” and “best,” and “worse” and “worst,” not “gooder” and “badder,” and “goodest” and “baddest.” You might encounter “baddest” in colloquial English, as in “He’s the baddest of the bad,” but I wouldn’t say that in front of your English teacher.
Three-syllable adjectives
Adjectives with three or more syllables use “more” or “most” in front of the adjective. For example, with the five-syllable adjective “extraordinary,” you use “more” or “most,” as in “That is the most extraordinary hat I’ve ever seen!” You can’t say, “extraordinariest.” That’s a mouthful.
The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage did mention that you could use polysyllabic adjectives with an unexpected “-er” or “-est” on the end to create a special effect. Alice from “Alice in Wonderland,” for example, said, “Curiouser and curiouser.”
Two-syllable adjectives
Two-syllable adjectives are a bit trickier than the others we’ve discussed. Or is that "more tricky"? (It’s actually “trickier.”) Sometimes you have to use the suffixes, other times you have to use “more” or “most,” and in some cases you can use either one.
The adjectives “squeaky” and “careful” have two syllables, so do you say “squeakier” or “more squeaky”? “Carefulest” or “most careful”? As far as “squeaky,” you use the suffixes, as in “The squeakiest wheel gets the grease.” On the other hand, you can’t say, “carefuler” and “carefulest.” You have to say, “more careful” and “most careful.”
When it comes to two-syllable adjectives, it seems a bit arbitrary whether you use the suffixes or the words in front, but I did find one rule to help you: two-syllable adjectives that end in “-y,” “-ow,” and “-le” can take the suffixes “-er” and “-est.” Remember that by thinking they're y-ow-le howl-ey! Y-ow-le. Yowle. Or better yet, think that they are yowlier and howlier than everything else, so you remember the adjective endings “-y,” “-ow,” and “-le,” and the rule to end them with “-er” or “-est.” They’re yowlier and howlier.
A listener, Ashley, wondered if she should say “more subtle” or “subtler.” Since “subtle” ends in “-le,” you would use “subtler” and “subtlest.” According to this rule, “funny,” “mellow,” and “gentle” are other examples of two-syllable adjectives that take the suffixes, making the correct choices "funnier," "mellower," and "gentler."
Sometimes, though, no rule will help you determine which way to make a comparison. Some two-syllable adjectives can go both ways. You can say, “commoner” or “more common,” “tranquilest” or “most tranquil,” “stupider” or “more stupid,” and “naivest” or “most naive.”
According to Garner’s Modern English Usage, which specifically lists those two-way adjectives, “The terminational forms are usually older, and some of them are becoming obsolete,” so “tranquilest,” for example, which sounds a bit odd to me and raises a flag in Microsoft Word’s spell checker, is moving out of favor. If you have a two-syllable adjective that doesn’t end in “-y,” “-ow,” or “-le” (it's not yowlier), you’ll need to rely on your ear or your dictionary, and Garner's Modern English Usage says that “if a word ordinarily takes the ‘-er’ or the ‘-est’ suffix — and that formation sounds more natural — it’s poor style to use the two-word form with ‘more’ or ‘most.’”
Comparing adverbs
So far we’ve talked about adjectives, but adverbs follow the same rules. Adverbs are words that describe adjectives, verbs, or other adverbs.
For example, with the one-syllable adverb “soon,” you add the suffix, as in, “Whoever finishes the chores soonest will earn a prize.” You wouldn’t say, “most soon.”
For adverbs with three or more syllables, such as “comfortably,” you need to say “more comfortably,” not “comfortablier.”
Some two-syllable adverbs, such as “early,” take the suffixes, so you would say, “earlier” and “earliest.” Some others, such as “sadly,” take “more” or most,” as in “more sadly” and “most sadly.” If you're unsure, check a dictionary. If the suffix form is allowed, as it is with “earlier,” for example, it will be listed in the dictionary entry.
‘Less’ and ‘least’
The comparisons we’ve been talking about have all involved a greater amount of something. When you’re talking about not as much, you use “less” and “least” in front of adjectives or adverbs with any number of syllables. For example, you might admit, “I am less athletic than my best friend” or, if you’re using an adverb, you could lament, “My roommate is the least grammatically oriented person I know.”
That’s all for now, but that’s not the mostest we can say about comparisons. I mean, that’s not all, so be sure to listen next week for part two.
That segment was by Bonnie Mills, who has been a copy editor since 1996.
Finally, I have a familect story.
"Hello. My name is Fredrick. I live in Montreal, and my family's unique way of saying your TV remote is the 'clicker clack.' I believe the 'clicker clack' comes from the fact that all throughout my childhood we had a really old TV with a really old remote that still has physical buttons. Press it down, it goes click and clacks into place until you press the different button. So our TV remote name is the 'clicker clack.' Have a nice day."
They did used to be a lot louder — clickier. Thanks, so much.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice quiet place, and we might play it on the show.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast, Thanks to our audio engineer Nathan Semes, and our director of podcasts Adam Cecil, who recently learned to make japchae from the Korean Vegan. (I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up, and it’s a noodle dish that looks delicious.) Thanks also to our digital operations specialist Holly Hutchings, our ad operations specialist Morgan Christianson, and our marketing associate Davina Tomlin. Finally, Kamryn Lacy just finished her internship with us, but she also graduated magna cum laude with a degree in marketing and is on her way to an MBA program in the fall. We’ll miss you Kamryn — you’re a rockstar. Thanks for everything.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.
The following references did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
Other sources for the "TV Language" segment:
Brain, M. “How Television Works.” How Stuff Works. https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/tv.htm (accessed May 8, 2023).
Epting, C. “Popular Phrases Invented by TV Shows.” ScreenCrush. September 23, 2022. https://screencrush.com/popular-phrases-invented-by-tv-shows/ (accessed May 8, 2023).
Perritano, J. “10 Ways Television Has Changed the Way We Talk.” How Stuff Works. https://people.howstuffworks.com/culture-traditions/tv-and-culture/10-ways-television-has-changed-the-way-we-talk.htm (accessed May 8, 2023).
References for the "Comparatives" segment:
Burchfield, R. W, ed. The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Third edition. New York: Oxford, 1996, p. 22.
American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, p. 13.
Garner, B. Garner's Modern English Usage. Fifth Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.2022, p. 229.