Furthermore, inasmuch as….
Dear WD: Is “moreso” a word? I can’t find it in my dictionaries; my spell-checker doesn’t like it, but I’ve been reading and hearing it everywhere recently. Two examples from the one page of the sports section: ” … and he is confident the ’96 Braves, moreso than the ’72 Braves will embrace a teenager.” “Shrouded this time by closer Mark Wohlers’ franchise-record 31st save moreso than John Smoltz’s seamless season, ….” — R. Duvall.
Your spell checker is not alone. I not only don’t like “moreso,” I don’t understand why anyone would write that way. If you had supplied only one example, I’d have said that it was almost certainly a typographical error, but if “moreso” is truly suddenly commonplace, I am deeply alarmed. Mutant words seem to be springing up in the Sports Section.
I should call a time-out at this point and mention that I am absolutely, utterly sports-illiterate, and have never read the sports section of any newspaper. Ever. Really. True, I did manage the baseball, hockey and soccer teams in high school, but my duties in each case had only a marginal relationship to the particular sport per se. My primary duty to the soccer team, for instance, seemed to be to warn our coach if I spotted the Headmaster coming, so he would have time to put away his flask. My role in the grand scheme of the hockey team, on the other hand, consisted largely of driving newly-toothless players to the Emergency Room. I became awesomely proficient in filling out hospital forms and calming distraught parents.
But I digress. You say that you have been reading and hearing “moreso” everywhere. Hearing it doesn’t bother me — after all, “more so” (two words) is a perfectly respectable construction meaning “to a greater extent than.” Radio and television “sportscasters” slurring the two words together doesn’t surprise me. Sportswriters jamming “more” and “so” together into one word repeatedly in print, however, is a bad idea. What about its opposite construction, “less so”? Are we now to glop these together into “lesso”? Soon we’ll be facing “inorderto” and “inspiteof,” not to mention “nottomention.” Welcome to Mars. Somebody hand me that flask.
Well said, “more-so or less-so”. . . .
My English major agrees with you, while my linguistics minor must disagree. This is simply the evolution of language. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Jared – as a fellow linguist, just because there’s no objective basis for declaring things “wrong” or “right” doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to have an opinion. Tell ‘em they’re wro- er, non-standard; if they don’t care or honestly prefer it that way they can keep on doing it, if they didn’t realise it was non-standard they can fix it. Any kind of evolution needs some kind of selection pressure to keep it in check…
And as a casual wiki-editor, yes this is popping up everywhere and becoming a real pet peeve. ‘Alot’ I can understand, because it would slip through spellcheckers, but ‘moreso’?
“Tell ‘em they’re wro- er, non-standard; if they don’t care or honestly prefer it that way they can keep on doing it, if they didn’t realise it was non-standard they can fix it. Any kind of evolution needs some kind of selection pressure to keep it in check…”
Awesome. I’m gonna practice saying “non-standard” in my Boris Karloff accent.
“Tell ‘em they’re wro- er, non-standard; if they don’t care or honestly prefer it that way they can keep on doing it, if they didn’t realise it was non-standard they can fix it. Any kind of evolution needs some kind of selection pressure to keep it in check…”
Awesome. I’m gonna practice saying “non-standard” in my Boris Karloff accent.
> Soon we’ll be facing “inorderto”
How shocking! I expect that sooner or later, somebody will dare to contract a phrase like “be the cause” into the equally ugly “because”.
Or “per cent” into the utterly insane “percent”. Or contract “to-day” into “today”.
And then where would we be, eh? I quite agree: this disturbing trend must be nipped in the bud before chaos ensues every… where.
My favorite response!!!
Haha, this is perfect. You make a very good point. Things like “alot” are not used by writers, but those who do not care. “Moreso” is something that was really thought over before written. The respondent sounds like one of those people who still try to get away with “to-day” and finds books from the 20s to have the most “proper” English.
In my opinion, this contraction is simply the evolution of language, and not an abomination to English. Trying to conserve what some woild call “proper academic English” would merely inhibit the progression of communication. If someone says a word to me in dialogue, and I understand the meaning of it, then that is to be considered effective communication. It seems to me, but its only a hunch, that the point of language is to provide a common medium for for communication. The attempts at conserving traditional academic English are the real abominations. They only limit creativity and expression. Plus, where would we be in language NEVER evolved? We wouldnt be talking, that’s where we’d be…
Plus! Moreso is in the Bible; aka the best selling book ever written. BOOM. Get with the program, you’re about two millennia behind.
You…you do realize that they didn’t speak English two millenia ago, right? If you were being facetious, I applaud.
But if you’re looking to a series of collected creative works written by farmers and tribesmen in the bronze age and then translated innumerable times as a source of linguistic insight for modern English words…BOOM. Egg on your screen.
Just for a thought…I wonder if its “use” or misuse might be vaguely linked to the word “whatsoever”? Since that’s pretty familiar and correct, people may be doing “moreso” by a sort of back-formation (is that spelled right, hyphen, one word, two words?)
I guess I think that because I’m an “English major person” and I’ve often been a bit iffy about “moreso”…so I guess my theory here is really my own thought process.
Oh, I hadn’t noticed the “furthermore” and “inasmuch” at the heading here…but still, I think “whatsoever” could be the closest link to “bad back-formation.”
Your definition of the phrase “more so” encompasses too much as the suboordinating conjunction “than” is external to the meaning you presuppose. Whatevs.
“What about its opposite construction, “less so”? Are we now to glop these together into “lesso”? Soon we’ll be facing “inorderto” and “inspiteof,” not to mention “nottomention.” Welcome to Mars. Somebody hand me that flask.”
GASP! Imagine, a living language evolving. Now imagine if we were all still stuck with Old English…