Here’s one that you have to go back over a thousand years to find the etymology of the word. For nearly all adjectives in English, the positive, the comparative, and the superlative forms of the word come from the same root. So, for instance, the words “slow”, “slower”, and “slowest” are the positive, the comparative, and the superlative forms of that adjective. There are only two adjectives in English that have irregular forms for those three forms of the adjective, and they are very common words. (In general, the words that are irregularly conjugated are very common words. For instance, one of the few verbs that has an irregular conjugation in English is “to be”. The various forms of “to be” are ones like “am”, “is”, “are”, and “been”. Words that are very common tend not to get regularized as much.)
The positive, the comparative, and the superlative forms being “good”, “better”, and “best” is the first example. The positive, the comparative, and the superlative forms being “bad”, “worse”, and “worst” is the second example. So how did those two examples arise? In each case, the conjugation of two words got smushed together. “Good” came from one adjective. “Better” and “best” came from another adjective. Those two adjectives meant approximately the same thing. The two conjugations got smushed together into a single one. In the second case, “bad” came from one adjective. “Worse” and “worst” came from another adjective. Those two adjectives meant approximately the same thing. The two conjugations got smushed together into a single one.
Now look at “bad”, “worse”, and “worst”. Where did the form “bad” come from? This is going to sound bizarre (and doubtlessly offensive), but this is now generally accepted as the etymology of the form “bad”. There was an Old English (i.e., pre-1150 A.D.) word “bæddel” which meant various things like “hermaphrodite”, “homosexual male”, “effeminate”, and “womanish”. “Worse” and “worst” came from another adjective. “Bæddel” got shortened to “bad”. “Bad” then got used to mean just something like “wicked”. These two conjugations got smushed together. Seriously, look this up online if you don’t believe it.
Do you have a cite this is poor usage? I completely disagree. All the dictionaries seem to be fine with that form, and none mark it even as “informal.”
Back when I was in high school, we all wanted to buy fancy wheels for our cars. Cragar and Keystone were popular brands. A rim was known to be the part of a wheel at its circumference- the part that held on the tire.
Because of the recent film, I learned that “corsage” used to refer to women’s bodices or corsets, and the use for flowers or other adornments is a more recent takeover.
Late to this, but I just thought it was a point worthy of calling out. Those words are so commonly referenced by people who believe in “euphemism treadmills,” as though “moron” was ever a predominantly clinical term used in good faith by well-meaning scientists and corrupted by popular usage, that it bears noting it was always just an insult by cruel people looking to slander others from its earliest usage in the 1910s, even with the fig leaf of a medical definition (which was never consistent from author to author—a “mental age” of 10 to 12? 8 to 12? 10 to 14?).
Some of those people were “scientists” behaving “scientifically,” for as many air quotes as you want to put around those words when you’re talking about eugenics. Most of them were not, like John S. Hurty averring: “Abe Martin knows the moron for he says ‘no woman ever looked right with a dog in her arms’” and “the member who introduced one hundred and five bills at a recent session of the Indiana Legislature was a moron”1 or W.A. Evans, writing for the Belleville News-Democrat, “many feeble-minded women are beautiful. In fact certain types of beauties are generally morons.”2 In this he echoes Victor Vaughan, dean at the University of Michigan, lamenting how “many a young man has fallen victim to the bewitching moron girl” and her “vine-like clinging.”3
Either contemporary writers just wanted a word to call people they didn’t like stupid, or they genuinely thought that those darned purty girls had a “mental age” of 12—in which case they were kind of, ah. Well, morons. Omaha Daily Bee staff writer John H. Kearnes realized the hollowness of the eugenicists in summarizing “morons” as people “offensive to the experimenters in the new realm of mental and social hygiene—those who are trying to develop a super-race […] and who will experiment on the children of the poor and on the unfortunate derelicts who make up the flotsam and jetsam of Nebraska life.”4
It was never anything but a cruel pejorative, except to the extent that it was a cruel pejorative used not only by op-ed writers but by eugenicist social reformers and racists (“perhaps, with plenty of play and spontaneous occupation, we can save the South Italian and the Hungarian and the Russian Jew from becoming morons, as they are so strongly inclined to do”5), whose intellectual bankruptcy was realized contemporaneously. It’s not really like the word had a lot of evolving to do.
Syndicated widely, but here from the Fort Wayne Sentinel on July 17th, 1918
“Some ‘Baby Dolls’ Morons,” May 25th, 1920
“‘Don’t Marry the Clinging Vine Girl,’ Says Dean Vaughan to U of M. Students” in the St. Joseph Evening Herald-Press, January 14th, 1913
“State Embarks On Policy to Check Morons,” February 16th, 1919
Transactions on the Fifteenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, Vol. 3, 1913.