[Ads-l] "best-known" avoidance

[Stanton McCandlish]

I did that yesterday! It was in a Facebook comment. On a re-read, it glared
out at me, so I edited the post to change "most well" to "best".

I think it happens from reflexively treating adjectival "well-dressed",
"well-known", etc. as unitary expressions, to then modify as units by
adding other modifiers like "most", "less", "somewhat", etc., rather than
changing the already-embedded "well[-]" (or "poorly" or "badly" or
whatever) modifier.


On Wed, May 29, 2024 at 2:51 PM Nancy Friedman <wordworking at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Not just “most well known”: I've also seen “most well preserved,” “most
> well designed,” and even “most well dressed.”
>
> Nancy Friedman
> Chief Wordworker
> https://wordworking.com
> https://fritinancy.substack.com
>
> tel 510 652-4159
> cel 510 304-3953
> twitter/mastodon/instagram/bluesky/Threads @Fritinancy
>
> On Wed, May 29, 2024, 12:52 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > For several years (five? ten? more?) I've been noticing that cable news
> > people have conspicuously dropped "best-known" in favor of the
> pointlessly
> > extended "most well-known."
> >
> > Weird hypercorrection?  Or what?
> >
> > OED has "best-known," without comment, from 1541.
> >
> > JL
> >
> > --
> > "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the
> truth."
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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>

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