So, what about
severer? Greynomad has questioned whether it should continue to be classed as common, in fact he doubts that it is a word at all.
Under what circumstances might an adjective be common - as
severe certainly is - while its comparative form ending in
-er is rare?
Obviously the question of whether a word exists at all is a threshold issue. One reason a word might have no comparative form is that its meaning precludes comparison. This can raise some contentious issues (see
nuder), but it needn't concern us here, since there obviously can be degrees of severity.
The other reason why there might be no such word as
severer would be if
more severe were the only acceptable comparative form. Over the years various forumites have attempted to spell out the rules determining which words can take an
-er ending. Unfortunately these did not impress me as authoritative, since they generally seemed to be someone's recollections of what they were taught in school when they were 9 or 10 years old.
I think the reality is that there are no hard and fast rules. H W Fowler, in the first edition of his
Modern English Usage (1926), begins his discussion of "-ER & -EST, MORE & MOST" in a stern, one might say severe, vein, but he continues in a more accommodating way:
Neglect or violation of established usage with comparatives & superlatives sometimes betrays ignorance, but more often reveals the repellent assumption that the writer is superior to the conventions binding on the common herd. The remarks that follow, however, are not offered as precise rules, but as advice that, though generally sound, may on occasion be set aside.
In the category of "adjectives regularly compared with
-er &
-est in preference to
more and
most" Fowler includes "many disyllables with accent on the last (
polite,
profound, &c...)" Rather than opening up a debate about whether
severe has two syllables or three, let's move on to more current sources of advice.
Not all dictionaries specify the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives, but of those that do, all seem to accept
severer and
severest. This includes the online versions of Merriam-Webster, Oxford, American Heritage, Collins, Dictionary.com and Wiktionary.
One dictionary that doesn't give guidance on comparative and superlative forms is the
Shorter Oxford, but its usage examples for
severe include several instances of
severer and
severest:
Shelley To pursue this monstrous crime By the severest forms of law.
...
Ld Macaulay Nor..will the severest of our readers blame us.
...
J. A. Froude A Roman matron of the strictest and severest type.
...
Hazlitt A day spent in social retirement and elegant relaxation from severer studies.
...
J. Tyndall In the following experiment the ice was subjected to a still severer test.
The full OED has 10 instances of
severer and 17 of
severest.
Here are some examples of
severer from recent news stories. The Australian version of the
Daily Mail in 2014, reporting on the views of a researcher from the University of New South Wales:
Dr Large said that studies have shown that cannabis smokers who develop schizophrenia, do so about three years earlier than people with schizophrenia who don't use the drug. It also leads to a 'severer and more irreversible' form of the illness.
The
Financial Express of Bangladesh, talking last January about traffic disruptions caused by political rallies:
The pain that the Dhaka commuters experienced on the streets last Saturday is yet fresh in their memory. But it certainly would not last long as they might soon be subjected to identical or even severer form of agonies.
And a 2011 article in the
Telegraph, UK:
More worryingly for Mr Abbas, al Jazeera is promising to disclose additional documents whose impact could be much severer.
I don't think any of these quotes sound "wrong". In some cases, substitution of
more severe could create ambiguity: are "more severe studies" studies that are more severe, or more studies that are severe? "Severer studies" is unambiguously the former.
It must be admitted that the vast corpus from which I sourced some of these examples, News on the Web, has only 68 instances of
severer, compared to over 11,000 of
more severe.
Severest is used more frequently, with 795 examples, but this is still a lot less than the 6389 instances of
most severe. Phrases like "severest punishment" and "severest penalties" seem to crop up fairly often in the news.
So I've no doubt that
severer is a word (as is
severest), but is it so uncommonly used that a typical player might be unaware of its existence, or possible existence? I don't think so, on balance.
Severer will remain as a common word.