[Ads-l] X-er than Y-er revisited

[Laurence Horn]

We had a brief thread 8 years ago on “rather"-less “sooner than later”, which I had begun to notice in New York Times headlines and elsewhere,
and Arnold then posted in response as follows (Sept. 8, 2011):

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if so, then we can hope to find people who judge "sooner rather than later" to be less acceptable than "sooner than later" because it's wordy (Omit Needless Words!).

in song:

"Sooner Than Later" [by Drake]
[lyrics omitted here—LH]
and in the sports news yesterday (about football):

Era of the super conference might come sooner than later
By Kelly Whiteside, USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/big12/story/2011-09-05/Era-of-the-super-conference-might-come-sooner-than-later/50266938/1

and on August 15 (again about football):

NFL expects female officials sooner than later
By Doug Farrar

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/blog/shutdown_corner/post/NFL-expects-female-officials-sooner-than-later?urn=nfl-wp5112

then there's Paul Brians's advice:

The traditional expression "sooner rather than later" is now commonly abbreviated to the less logical "sooner than later”. The shorter form is very popular, but is more likely to cause raised eyebrows than the similarly abbreviated expression "long story short”
http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/soonerthan.html

a simply enormous number of hits.

arnold
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Agreed.  John Lawler later offered a defense of the logic behind the rather-less comparative (which, in parallel to hyponegations like “could care less” and “That’ll teach you to…”, I propose to call a hypocomparative) in a posting on stack exchange, https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/118298/whats-the-verdict-on-sooner-than-later.  Others suggested it may be a blend with “sooner or later”.

So now, on last night’s episode of “Instinct” (CBS), we have the following dialogue:

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Lt. Jasmine Gooden (Sharon Leal):   I get the torture. Why the suicide?
Dr. Dylan Reinhart (Alan Cumming): Torturers can often be overcome by a profound sense of shame. Getting revenge can often make people feel worse than better.
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A quick glance at google hits suggests that “worse than better” (without a comparative trigger elsewhere in the vicinity, as in “Things are more likely to be getting worse than better”, which I found in a 2014 headline) in place of “worse rather than better” is far less robust than “sooner than later”, and there’s no obvious blendee of the form “worse or better” to invoke here, given the irreversibility of “better or worse". 

Has anyone else encountered rather-less hypocomparatives of this kind—other than “sooner than later”?  

LH
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