Awfuller and awfuller

Andrew Malcolm, Los Angeles Times: "The bad political news is his awful poll numbers are getting awfuller, which isn't a word but should be in this case."

You know this blog's default position: Every word is real, just as every person is special. But "awfuller" is a good test of how real real is.

First things first. It is really "real." Mark Twain thought so; John Keats did; Charles Dickens did; Margaret Atwood did; Elizabeth Barrett Browning did; Gertrude Stein did. The OED thinks so, too, listing it as an occasional comparative for "awful."

The problem is that "occasional." Language Log has been having a good recurring conversation on inflected adjectives and the difference between wrong and unusual, and that gets at the problem here. Comparative forms, like all words, have their vogue, and there are winners and losers. In 2010, awfuller is a loser. If you check Google News' historical archive, its use is pretty damn scarce, and when it does surface, you'll see it in a lot of jokey escalations of awfulness like Andrew Malcolm's. Malcolm made a case for awfuller right there in his copy and even he hung it out to dry.

It's probably not even as common as "awfullest," you know that? By two very rough and unscientific measures of published English, the Google News archive and the New York Times archive, awfuller gets smoked. And people will say awfullest and mean it. They'll use it in hardship. Why is this? We can speculate ... when you go for a comparative form of awful, you're probably trying to express an extreme, not putting this new awfulness on a continuum. Plus, awfuller -- I'm sorry -- just sounds like gagging.

Will there be another day for awfuller? Well, people are going to have to start using it unapologetically. Who's first?