Qualifiable favorite?

[Arnold Zwicky]

a. murie asks if FAVORITE is gradable, and lynne murphy says it is for
her.  it is for me too.

i think that the generalization is that if you can conceive of
approximations to the state denoted by an adjective, then you can
treat the adjective as gradable.  if you can use ALMOST, say, with the
adjective, then you can construct a scale of degrees of approximation
to the state, and then you can meaningfully use the comparative grade
of the adjective.  (nouns too - "more of a man" - and prepositional
phrases - "more in tune".)

it follows that there are very few adjectives that can't be used
gradably, at least in the sense that a well-intentioned person would
understand what you meant by something like "more favorite".  on the
other hand, many adjectives are conventionally gradable - graded
occurrences of the adjective are frequent - while others aren't, at
least at a particular time and for a particular speech community.
it's the difference between getting gradability for free, as it were,
and having to work for it.

of course, things change, and (conventional) gradability tends to
spread.  people who resist change are going to be unhappy about that.
in the case of gradability (as in many other cases) the resisters tend
to pick on a handful of new usages as being unacceptable (or
"meaningless") and disregard many others.  not infrequently, they
continue to pick on this disfavored handful for years, decades, or
even centuries after gradability has been conventional for these
adjectives for virtually all (other) speakers of the language.

arnold, approving of "a more perfect union" (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)