Scott,
If winningest is not standard, I'm sure it soon will be. For fun I Googled a few other -ingest words and found examples of all of them. For example, lovingest has been used by some literary lights:
" The acutest German, the lovingest disciple, could
never tell what Platonism was; indeed, admirable texts can be quoted on
both sides of every great question from him." — Ralph Waldo Emerson
"He told her she had been all her life the lovingest, truest, and most obedient daughter Heaven ever sent to a poor old widowed man."
— Charles Reade,
The Cloister and the Hearth
I even tried fightingest and found informal instances on blogs:
"I commanded the Flying
Hellfish, the fightingest squad in the fightingest company in the
third-fightingest battalion in the army." —Tom Davenport
Ditto for singingest, laughingest, and cryingest. I remember reading in the paper a few years ago that one small town painted characters on all its fireplugs and proudly called itself "the plug-paintingest town in America."
Dick Veit
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Scott Lavitt
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
|
Recently a high school boy used the word "winningest," as in "the winningest team," which just sounds wrong to me. It's listed as an informal word in Webster's. I was trying to think of a rule why this may not be SAE. First I thought perhaps the double suffix, -ing and -est, but I can think of examples where double suffixes are acceptable. I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on the matter.
Thank you,
Scott |
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