The best of one
superlative
According to The Ethicist at
The
New York Times Magazine, Randy Cohen, something
can be the best only if there are at least three things in the
comparison set. This, Cohen tells us (5/29/05, p. 22), is a
matter of fact, and it's a matter of fact because it's a matter of
grammar. This grammarian objects.
Cohen is replying to a query from Steven Tanzer of Bayside NY:
My son's school announced that a $750
scholarship would be awarded to a senior submitting the best short
essay by Feb. 1. After the deadline, the school announced that
because only one student had applied for the scholarship, it was
extending the deadline. My son protested: according to the rules,
he should be the winner because he submitted the only and best
essay. Was it ethical to extend the deadline?
No, Cohen replies:
Even if your son were content to win on
a technicality, he doesn't have much of a case. If the prize is
for "the best short essay," the school may not award it to him.
The superlative "best" necessarily refers to the most impressive of
three or more -- good, better, best. If there are not at least
three entries, there can be no best essay. Live by legalisms; die
by legalisms.
On the question of whether it's ok for the school to extend the
deadline (for whatever reasons), I will not pronounce. But on the
grammatical question I have an opinion -- which is that Cohen's dictum,
that it takes three to make a superlative, is not a rule of English and
is therefore irrelevant to any ethical considerations.
Writers and speakers of English frequently use superlatives for
reference classes of unknown size. If I offer something for
auction to the highest bidder, if I advertise that I will award a
contract to the lowest bidder satisfying the requirements I stipulate,
if I place a personals ad and tell my friends that I'll go with the guy
whose photo strikes me as the handsomest, in all these situations it
might turn out that reference class is huge, but it might turn out that
it's empty (in which case nothing happens), and it might turn out that
it's of size 1 (in which case that one's the winner) or 2 (in which
case the respectively higher, lower, or more handsome candidate
wins). In a slightly more subtle example, if I offer concert
tickets to the first person who requests them and only one person
responds, that person (the first of one respondents) gets the
tickets. This is everyday reasoning, using everyday language.
(Mathematicians, with their passion for generality, take the same
route. If you're looking at sets of elements with a total
ordering on them and defining "least" and "greatest" on these sets,
then your definitions will extend to sets of cardinality 1 and 2.
As a result, two positive integers always have a greatest common
divisor, even if -- as is the case with relatively prime numbers, like
15 and 16 -- they have only one common divisor, 1.)
Now, back in the real world, you might want to set a size for the
reference class. Maybe you'll insist that there must be at least
four qualified bidders on your contract. Or three. Or
two. That's up to you. In the case of the school essay
contest, it might have been wise (as Cohen himself observes) for the
school to have prepared for the contingency of only one applicant and
to have set, in advance, a minimum number of applicants. But none
of this has anything to do with grammar.
There is much silliness abroad on the "logic" governing the use of
comparatives and superlatives. Check out, for example, the
entertaining entry in
Merriam-Webster's
Dictionary of English Usage for
superlative
of two (as in Thomas Gray's "if one is alive and the other dead,
it is usually the latter that is the handsomest"). If there's
ever another edition of
MWDEU,
maybe it should have an entry on
superlative
of one (citing Cohen, of course).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 30, 2005 11:15 AM