It occurred to me just now that something can be the damnedest thing<\/i>, and something can be a damned thing<\/i>, but I\u2019ve never heard anyone refer to something as a damneder thing<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n
But I figured before posting about it, I should do a bit of research to be sure damneder<\/i> isn\u2019t in wide use.<\/p>\r\n
And I found it in the Free Dictionary<\/cite>, in the entry for damned<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Well, fine,<\/i> I thought, but obviously it wouldn\u2019t be in a really good<\/cite> dictionary<\/i>. So I checked MW11<\/cite>\u2026which also mentions it in the entry for damned<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n Okay<\/i>, I thought, so even a reputable dictionary might decide that an adjective ought in theory to have a comparative form, even if nobody ever uses that form. That must have happened here; obviously they wouldn\u2019t have any examples, because nobody uses this word<\/i>. And sure enough, I smugly noted that MW11<\/cite> didn\u2019t give any usage examples for damneder<\/i>.<\/p>\r\n So I went back to the Free Dictionary<\/cite> to demonstrate to myself that it too obviously had no examples\u2026and I found that it does in fact list two examples.<\/p>\r\n First, from an article entitled \u201cRomantic reverence and modernist representation: vision, power, and the shattered form of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/a>,\u201d by an unknown author, possibly written in 2007:<\/p>\r\n In short, damned if you do, but damneder if you don't.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n And second, from a 2006(?) review of Henry George's Legacy in Economic Thought<\/cite><\/a>:<\/p>\r\n He declared that Georgist thought was 'More damneder nonsense than poor Rousseau's blether'.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n Dispirited, I poked around further online. Wiktionary put the final nail in the coffin of my disbelief in anyone using this word, in an example in their entry for damneder<\/a>:<\/p>\r\n Moore replied \u201cYou are a damneder liar!\u201d Both men reached for their pistols and in the quick exchange of shots that followed, Moore was killed.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n
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