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The Weaker Link
Monday, September 17th, 2007 08:05 pmHaving (I hope to your satisfaction) demonstrated that "He is taller than me" is better English than "He is taller than I," I'd like to turn my attention to the thorny question of whether it is possible to say "He's the tallest" when we're only talking about two people.
Grammar books will tell you that this is incorrect, and even John Humphrys in Lost For Words corrects himself for having used this structure, adding that in the last round of The Weakest Link, Anne Robinson should say to the loser not "You are the weakest link" but "You are the weaker link."
But why shouldn't she say "the weakest"? The objection to "weakest" is that it implies that there is also a weaker and a weak. But why should this be the case? Applying logic to language is a tricky business, but since it is in the service of popular usage, I'll give it a try here. If we say that x is the yest z, surely what we are saying is that there is a set, z, all the elements of which demonstrate quality y, but to a lesser extent than x. Now this is as true if the set has only two members as if it has a hundred. If John is the weakest link, then there is no link which is as weak as John, or weaker than him, so he is the weakest link however many links there are.
Prescriptivists retort by asking why we say "He's my older brother." If there are only two brothers, then the older brother is, by the definition proposed here, also the oldest, so why don't we say that? I would guess that the secret is in the word "my". The set here is not "my brother and I" but "my brothers". I'm not saying that I have two brothers, Tom and Dick, of whom Tom is the older (or oldest); all I'm saying is that Tom is my brother and he is older than me (but not necessarily older than Dick).
Grammar books will tell you that this is incorrect, and even John Humphrys in Lost For Words corrects himself for having used this structure, adding that in the last round of The Weakest Link, Anne Robinson should say to the loser not "You are the weakest link" but "You are the weaker link."
But why shouldn't she say "the weakest"? The objection to "weakest" is that it implies that there is also a weaker and a weak. But why should this be the case? Applying logic to language is a tricky business, but since it is in the service of popular usage, I'll give it a try here. If we say that x is the yest z, surely what we are saying is that there is a set, z, all the elements of which demonstrate quality y, but to a lesser extent than x. Now this is as true if the set has only two members as if it has a hundred. If John is the weakest link, then there is no link which is as weak as John, or weaker than him, so he is the weakest link however many links there are.
Prescriptivists retort by asking why we say "He's my older brother." If there are only two brothers, then the older brother is, by the definition proposed here, also the oldest, so why don't we say that? I would guess that the secret is in the word "my". The set here is not "my brother and I" but "my brothers". I'm not saying that I have two brothers, Tom and Dick, of whom Tom is the older (or oldest); all I'm saying is that Tom is my brother and he is older than me (but not necessarily older than Dick).
