Recently, in a business meeting, while watching a presentation given by an esteemed colleague, I noticed the following pricing scheme: an entry level system marked as “good”, the next one marked as “better”, followed by “best”. Surprisingly, this was not the end of it. Following “best” came “ultimate”. I was rather confused. How can something, anything, be better than best? And then it dawned on me. Entry level doesn’t sound so great. Obviously, it can’t be marked less than “good”. So “good” was chosen as a starting point. The language did its job in providing the next two: “better”, and “best”. But they still had one system to mark. What do you do if the language provides only three words, when you have four items to scale? You get creative. They came up with “ultimate”. I loved it.
By the same token, “pretty”, “prettier”, “prettiest”, and “Angelina Jolie”? “ugly”, “uglier”, “ugliest” and “Ugly Bettie”?
And why stop there? What’s wrong with “bester”? Followed by “bestest” between best and ultimate? And why not ultimater, and ultimatest?
Coming to think about it though, the English language is so rich, that it has a very wide variety of words to describe almost anything. Here’s an example. Size. From big, through biggest to a lot more than that…
big, bigger, biggest (feel free to add biggester, biggestest here), gigantic, giant, enormous, monstrous, huge, colossal, vast, immense, tremendous, massive, hulking, towering, mammoth, prodigious, elephantine, mountainous, monumental, titanic gigantic, and there are more, I ‘m sure.
Thanks for bearing with me. I had to get it out…
Good to see that a thesaurus is still a useful tool in some professions. I got my first one when I graduated from high school, but it hasn’t gotten much use.