Ouch! How’s that for topical humor?
I’m actually posting this message with the desire to help mankind. You see, before people (not you guys) decide to leave a yet another inane comment after a Yahoo! news article, I hope they go over to Google, type Worst vs. Worse, and find this post explaining the difference. Because I can’t believe how many of them don’t know.
For the record…
1. When you are comparing two things that are not good (in your estimation), you say one is WORSE than the other.
2. When you are talking about a category of things, the one you despise most of all is the WORST.
Please don’t say, “Plan 9 From Outer Space is the WORSE movie ever made.” First of all, there are much, er, worse movies than Plan 9 From Outer Space. Sure, it’s bad, but it doesn’t come close to The Creeping Terror for putrid. And not even that movie is the worst movie ever made. I don’t know what the worst movie ever made is, but it might be Showgirls. That movie ended careers.
An example of worse, used correctly:
“Each episode of ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ is worse than the one before.”
In this case, you are comparing the latest episode to the previous episode.
An example of worst, used correctly:
“‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ is the worst show on TV. In this universe and the next.”
In this instance, you are comparing one show to all the other shows, and “shows” is a category of things.
At this point you might be thinking, “Hey, grammar dude, the second sentence in your example above is incomplete. Do you really think that is a good example to set?”
You must have heard your fifth-grade teacher say, “You have to know the rules before you can break them.” That’s what’s happening here. By the way, if you’d paid closer attention to your fifth-grade teacher, you wouldn’t leave comments after Yahoo! news articles in which you say things like, “Neptune is the worse planet in our whole stinkin’ solar system!” Because it’s not. Neptune is freaking cool.
Take a gander. It’s got “Conquer the Humans” written all over it: