Worse and worse

[Victor Steinbok]

Garson's bringing up of Andersen reminds me what I actually wanted to
say before I went all scatterbrained... The phrasing "each more X than
the next" (or "each Xer than the next" or "one more X than the next"),
particularly with X=beautiful, sounds to me like standard--yes, that
strong!--fairy tale formula for describing a row or sequence of very X
things or people. Andersen is fine, but it's really no different from
retellings of folk tales or other translations or even modern creations.
If I went to the local Borders or--recognizing that many Borders are
closing--B&N, I could probably pull down half-a-dozen fairy tale or
other children books that have a version of the phrase in them. It's
almost like a fairy-tale snowclone.

Perhaps Jon is just a bit further removed from the fairy-tale-reading
age. Or, perhaps, this is a novel formulaic invention in the more modern
retellings which might be unavailable to the earlier generations (note,
however, that I did not read fairy tales in English until college, so it
might be something from the 1980s+, not from the 1960s). But, as we've
seen from a number of posts, there is nothing particularly new about the
expression itself.

     VS-)

On 3/16/2011 5:56 PM, Garson O'Toole wrote:
> Here are some examples. I suspect that the word next is being
> re-interpreted. The ordering property of "next" is ignored. For
> example, "next day" might mean "some other day" or "another day."
> Consider the contrasting examples further below.
>
> ...
> The complete fairy tales and stories - Page 1056
> Hans Christian Andersen, Erik Christian Haugaard - 1983 - 1101 pages - Preview
> Letters came from Hans, one happier than the next. The family he lived
> with were well to do and ever so nice, but the best of all was the
> school. There was so much to learn that he wished he could live to be
> a hundred and become a ...
> ...

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org