The other day, on the front page of the LA Times, an article about the death of american college football coach Joe Paterno used the word “winingest”. That word has always grated on me. Hence the poll. Needless to say, I voted No.
P.S. I checked in Merriam-Webster, and they have “winningest” as a valid word, dating from 1972.
The OED gives it as 1974.
But certainly it’s a real word. You understand its meaning, don’t you? People use it in speech, don’t they?
It’s a verb which has been adjectified (which can weird language a bit, but is technically legal).
It has to be the case that enough people use it, though, and that is not the case here, in the UK. I mean, obviously we can work out from context that it means “winning the most” or something, but it still sounds like a non-word to us. I guess the OED includes a large chunk of North American English.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
My nuns would object ("‘Most winning,’ Mr zone."), but RC is right.
Word.
And why on earth would they do that?
Winning of course is a perfectly accepted adjective: She has a winning smile. Probably the issue is that here it takes a semantic twist, in order to refer to a competitive context. Still, it’s not unusual for this connotation: They’re a winning team.
It also might seem awkward because typically (with notable exceptions) superlatives formed from stems with more than one syllable take a construction with the most (the most winning, the most cunning, the most stunning etc.).
Weird, though, that no one ever says “Winninger.”
“Okay, they aren’t champs, but they made it to the play-offs, so their a winninger team than most of the others…”
Are there other words where we have a superlative but no comparative?
Anyway, I voted “not a real word” in the hyperformal sense of “not recognized by the grammar wonks at Harvard,” but Thudlow Boink wins the thread.
giggle
This bit will never grow old. Never.
Why? Not even Merriam-Webster lists “common usage” among its definition for “word.” But if we run with your interpretation, at what point do words that have fallen out of common use (like, say, wont or betwixt) suddenly become non-words? Curious minds would like to know! :eek:
In fact, any Doper could make up a word that nobody has ever said or heard before, and type it on this page, and it would still be a word as long as it’s logical and has a divinable meaning. Like, I dunno… Marveltastic? Fabulicious? Kittyriffic?
ETA: I say “typically” because, you’ll find it going both ways. This is from an obituary in Time magazine (Jan. 16, 2006):
[QUOTE=Time Magazine]
DIED. SHEIK MAKTOUM BIN RASHID AL-MAKTOUM, 62, pragmatic, business-minded Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and emir of Dubai who oversaw his city-state’s transformation from a minor trading post to a modern metropolis; of a suspected heart attack; in Australia. With brothers Mohammedwho succeeds him as emirand Hamdan, the avid thoroughbred fan founded Godolphin, one of horse racing’s most winning stables.
[/quote]
I’m not sure what your examples, such as “kittyrific”, would mean. That’s the point - words become words when enough people agree that they mean something. “Enough” is a grey area, but I hope we can agree that “kittyriffic” does not qualify.
Likewise, in British English, “winningest” does not qualify, because nobody ever says it.
It seems awkward because there are no other simlar constructions in common English speech.
I don’t think that’s the question; the question is, “What words have become productive with -est through popular use, but not with -er?” (Because for the comparative people just say, “the more winning team.”) This happens a lot more than one might suspect, but it happens for superlative only. That doesn’t mean there never was a comparative–it just means that for the comparative, people follow the rule.
[QUOTE=Washington Post (May 6, 2007)]
Throughout Fellow Travelers, he displays an expert’s knowledge of how to wield the novelist’s most effective tools, suspense and elision. His characters engage in swift, bantering repartee that is all the more winning for its artificiality.
[/quote]
[QUOTE=Chicago Sun Times (April 12, 1992)]
At lunch one day, two more winning dishes crossed our table. Charcoal broiled catfish (two quite large fillets) with strips of pickled red onions tossed freely across the top doesn’t sound very exciting, but in its simplicity lay its goodness.
[/quote]
The biggest exception is that two syllable words ending with an “ee” sound (funny, happy, lonely, etc.) generally take the “-er” and “-est” comparative and superlative endings. Not that that applies here.
In that second example, the “more” doesn’t strike me as a comparative modifying “winning.” In my parse, it functions in the sense of “additional” not as a comparative.
I looked back at the review, and you’re right–I thought that he was comparing it with less favorable dishes. You still hear it, though, such as on the PBS News Hour:
[QUOTE=PBS News Hour]
Indeed, somewhat ironically, the United States today and for the foreseeable future under the new guidance projects a much more potent, even more fighting, more winning threat at Russian strategic forces than we did during the 1980’s under the old war fighting doctrine.
[/quote]
They’re portmanteaux. You also failed to address my second point: when do words that fall out of common use become non-words? Common use is not necessary for a word to be a word. Just mutual understanding.
Extremely good question. There are lots of wonderful Elizabethan words – “paten” comes to mind – which appear in Shakespeare, but which people have to pause and look up, if they’re reading, or make a mental note of to look up later, if they’re watching a performance. They’re still words, even if 99 out of a hundred people don’t know them.
As for making up new words according to obvious rules, I think that understanding is all but guaranteed. Can there be anyone who, upon hearing “winningest,” can’t figure out what it means? (I mean among English speakers, of course; someone who only knows Malay might not work it out…)
This is why “kittyrific” works; it’s extremely obvious what it is intended to mean. (Another fun example is “finestkind” from Fusion, an old comic book.)
A faddish kind of popularity also works. Cromulent is a lovely example, and so are “Grok” and “Tanj” and “Pon Farr” and the like. Enough people know them, and know what they’re from, that they can be used with a decent expectation of understanding.
One has to be careful! Three different people wrote “Klingon Dictionaries” before one of them caught on and is now the de facto “official” Klingon language. I could quote from the other two, and not have any hope at all of understanding. Even the official one is pretty doggone obscure, the Klingon Language Institute notwithstanding.
“The Simpsons,” in contrast, has sufficient penetration into the popular psyche (“Nelson Muntz Laugh”) that its neologisms have a darn good chance of becoming known even at second and third hand. How many people citing “cromulent” have actually seen that episode? (I haven’t!)
P.S. I’m so out of touch, I was confused between Nelson and Milhouse! But I knew the laugh!
Yes it’s a real word. I recently saw it in a thread title.