Chipping away at -er comparatives?

[Amy West]

On 3/10/14, 12:07 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Sun, 9 Mar 2014 12:32:55 -0700
> From:    Benjamin Barrett<gogaku at IX.NETCOM.COM>
> Subject: Chipping away at -er comparatives?
>
> "drives me more crazy" gets about twice as many raw hits as "drives me crazier."
>
> I suppose this could be attributed to the adverb-like positioning (even though it's an adjective), though it seems like a small chip away from the -er form.
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Formerly of Seattle, WA
Hmmm. . . I know that I opted for the -er form instead of using "more"
because I wanted to call attention to it (and the underlying implication
that I'm already at a base level of crazy). I wanted readers to trip
over, if you will, that "crazier" where they would have expected just
"crazy" in the idiom.

I think I would have gone for "more crazy" if I had had a sentence where
I said "X drives me crazy, and then doing Y in addition only makes me
more crazy." Or "Nothing drives me more crazy than Z."

I know that I have both structures in my word hoard.

And isn't the tendency for shorter (1-syllable) adjs to take the
suffixes, but the longer ones to take the adverbs? more/most?
Two-syllable adjs like "crazy" are at the borderline . . .

---Amy West

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