Why I Just Lost Faith in Grammar Girl

All right, so I've been working on planning everything for Cuppa Caff. I'm planning a schedule, getting posts planned out to get myself started, and I've even started tweeting.

I was planning to wait to post again until I had a definite plan worked out, but…

I like grammar. Anybody who knows me even a little has probably figured that out. So I started following Grammar Girl, figuring it would be an enjoyable read.

Then I read a post today that makes me wonder just how much Grammar Girl actually knows about grammar. This post, in fact.

The post is on two words: former and latter. It's brief, concise, and only makes sense if you already knew how to use those two words. I realized that when one of the commenters made an incorrect application. I frankly had to reread the post to get what had confused that commenter, and now I'm twitchy and wishing Grammar Girl had thought before writing that post, because she's likely just made the problem worse.

What problem?

That most people misuse former and latter.

According to Grammar Girl, former means "first", and latter means "last". This is wrong.

Well, mostly wrong. It's a terrible definition when you're trying to teach folks who to use former and latter correctly, because that definition implies that former and first can be used interchangeably. Or that latter can replace last, or vice versa.

Not so.

Former and first are actually different forms of the same adjective: one is comparative; the other is superlative. Latter is the comparative form of the superlative last. Many adjectives have this distinction.

comparative adjective

makes a statement about 1 out of 2 items

Example: Jane did better on the test than Jim, but Jim is taller.

(Better and taller are comparative adjectives.)

superlative adjective

makes a statement about 1 out of 3+ items.

Example: James did the best on the test, and he is the tallest in the class.

(Best and tallest are superlative adjectives.)

See what I'm talking about? Former and latter are adjectives in the same category as better and taller: they are only used when 2 items are involved. As soon as a 3rd item comes out, first and last replace them.

(And yes, that means first and last are adjectives. Stop adding -ly to your list numbers, folks. But that's a post for another day.)