how can i become more smarter — the grammar holds
more smarter is not a phrase that survives a grammar check, and yet here we are, all of us, googling it at the rate of thousands per month, which means either the entire english-speaking internet has lost its mind on the same tuesday, or the phrase is doing something useful that the grammar people have not bothered to notice.
so when a person types how can i become more smarter into a search bar, the bar does not burst into flames. it answers. it answers because the phrase, while technically a crime, is also extremely clear about what the typer wants — to be smarter, and not just smarter, but more smarter, which is, if you read it slowly, a request for double the smartening. i would like to file a defense.
writing this from the standing desk i sit at, on a thursday, while the office heater wages a small private war against my left ankle. tab 23 of 47 is open to a search bar with the cursor still blinking.
how can i become more smarter: grammatically wrong on paper, but functionally correct in practice. smarter is already a comparative — it means more smart. saying more smarter is therefore double-emphasis comparative, the way most easiest or more better work in the mouths of people who actually want the thing badly. it’s not a mistake. it’s a request with feeling.
DOUBLE. THE COMPARATIVE. DOUBLE. THE INTENT.
the grammar people are not, technically, my friends
let me be honest with you. i did, briefly, this morning, look up the rules. i closed the tab almost immediately because the rules were written in a tone i associate with people who never had to ask how can i become more smarter at any point in their adult life. they were born already smarter. they were comparative from the womb.
the rules say: smarter is the comparative form of smart. you do not need to add more in front of it. more smarter is what is technically called a double comparative, and it is, technically, banned. shakespeare used it (“this was the most unkindest cut of all”, the man knew what he was doing) but you, sitting at a desk in 2026 with a microwave on its seventh life, are not allowed to. the rules were updated specifically to exclude you.
smart comes from old english smeortan, which originally meant to cause sharp pain — a much better word than what we got. smarter arrived later as the comparative. more smart, in older english, was also fine. nobody complained. then the grammar guild — i’m using the term loosely — decided you had to pick one or the other. they met in a room and they voted, and the vote went against me personally, before i was even born. the kind of decision a committee makes on a wednesday at 3:14pm when everyone wants to leave.
the case for the double comparative, made from a desk
here is the case. i am making it from a standing desk that, in the interest of full disclosure, i am sitting at, because that is what standing desks are for. you buy them standing. you adjust them downward. you settle in. anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a second standing desk.
when you say smarter, you are claiming a small upgrade. a quiet upgrade. polite. modest. not what i’m here for. when you say more smarter, you are claiming a serious upgrade. a desperate upgrade. the kind a man at a standing desk needs by lunch, because the morning has not gone well and there is a meeting at 3pm where someone is going to ask him a question he should already know. more smarter, in this context, is not a grammatical error. it is a cry for help. and the english language, if it had any decency, would honor the cry instead of correcting the grammar.
and another thing.
the people who object to more smarter on grammatical grounds are, in my experience, the same people who say literally when they mean figuratively, who say i could care less when they mean the opposite, and who pronounce library with one r when there are clearly two. these people have, in their own mouths, a hundred small crimes against english that they are willing to forgive because the crimes are theirs. more smarter is somebody else’s crime, which is why it gets the full grammar lecture. selective enforcement. i am keeping a list.
showers, theatre, and the four-minute rule
showers over 4 minutes are theatre. that’s the rule. i made it. i stand by it. anything past 4 minutes is performance — for yourself, for the steam, for the audience of nobody. it is not getting you cleaner. it is getting you more wet, which is not, structurally, a real upgrade.
grammar people will tell you the same thing about more smarter: you cannot be more smarter, you can only be smarter, the rest is theatre. and i will tell you, from my own experience in both showers and search bars, that theatre is the point. theatre is what you do when you want the moment to register — when you are not just asking a question but asking it loud enough that the universe might, against the odds, answer.
what google does when you ask, exactly
i typed how can i become more smarter into the search bar at 9:14 this morning. i did this for research, which in this house means i was procrastinating and called it work. google, to its credit, did not correct me. it returned a clean page of links to people offering me books, courses, sleep schedules, supplements, podcasts. none of the links said your grammar is wrong. machines are kinder than committees.
this whole question is really a question about how the brain decides what counts as evidence about itself. you ask because you already, on some level, think the answer is yes. that is not curiosity. that is scaffolding for a conclusion you’ve already drafted.
the part where i give you actual advice, against my better judgment
fine. you came here for an answer. if you want to become more smarter, in the full theatrical sense, here is what you do. you read things you don’t fully understand and finish them anyway. you talk to people who know more than you and ask the question you’re embarrassed to ask. you pay attention to the small detail everyone else skipped past. you write down what you noticed before you forget it.
also: you steal. respectfully. you watch what smart people do and you do the same thing slower, on purpose, until your version of it becomes a habit. ricky gervais, in an idiot abroad, once described his friend karl as somebody who looks at the world from a slightly wrong angle and says something nobody else would say — its own kind of smart. the show is a whole essay on the topic, although i would never watch it on principle.
more practically: notice when you’re nodding along just to feel right. that’s the moment your brain stops learning. catch it. push back at yourself. the smart move is the one that costs you a little ego. (if you want a less self-defeating angle, the post on what confirmation bias means covers why you trust the evidence that fits and discard the rest.)
verdict — the grammar holds, the question stands
so let me close this out.
how can i become more smarter is, on paper, a grammatically broken phrase. on paper, it is. i won’t pretend otherwise. but on the search bar — the actual search bar, where actual people type actual desperate questions on actual thursdays — it is the most honest version of the question that exists. the grammar holds because the intent holds. the redundancy is not a bug. it is the part that tells the universe, and yourself, that you mean it twice.
the people who correct it are, in my experience, not noticeably smarter than the people who type it. they are just better at hiding the search history.
(if you want to wander further into the weeds — a working definition of cognitive bias covers why your brain prefers the answer it already had before you asked.)
tab 23 just refreshed itself. the office heater has, mercifully, surrendered. the seventh microwave is at home, idle, unaware that i am writing about its competitors. the standing desk is, as ever, sitting.
so the grammar holds, the question stands, and the answer, as far as i can tell, is yes — you can become more smarter, two comparatives deep, as long as you are willing to type it that way in front of a search bar that will not, in spite of everything, correct you.
yours stupidly,
idiot again
two comparatives, one standing desk, one mostly-charged morning
P.S. i ran more smarter through the spell-checker before publishing. it underlined the phrase in red and offered smarter as a fix. i ignored it. the spell-checker is, like the grammar guild, not in charge here.
