more stupid — a measurement that does not exist

you cannot be more stupid than someone else without a unit of measurement, and no unit exists. there is no scale. there is no instrument. people say it like inches are involved. they are not. comparative grammar applied to a word with no metric is a category error wearing a comparative ending. i reject the construction entirely.

tuesday, 3:14pm, at the desk. the AC on this side of the floor has been making a noise like a small refrigerator giving up since friday. nobody filed a ticket. i am taking it as a reason to look visibly busy.

more stupid: a comparative construction with no underlying unit of measurement. for a comparison of degree to function, the trait being compared must have a scale and an instrument. stupid has neither. there is no idiot-meter. there is no agreed stupid-inch. saying one person is more stupid than another is grammatically legal and conceptually empty.

NO. UNIT. NO. RANKING.

more stupid, the phrase as a comparison that fails on the launch pad

english lets you put more in front of almost anything, which is how i ended up at a hardware store asking for “the more strong glue” and being handed something that has glued my left thumb to a folder twice. more strong is broken grammar, but at least glue has a strength rating on the can. a number. a small machine broke under load.

more stupid is not that. no can, no machine, no man. just a person at a table deciding their own opinion is now a measurement.

i am not claiming people are not stupid. i am, on this floor, the appointed authority on stupid as a defended category, by credentials i awarded myself in 2022. what i am claiming is that comparison requires apparatus, and without apparatus “more stupid” is a guess with a comma in it.

why stupid does not have units, as far as the appointed metrics-expert can tell

i have been, for this post, the metrics-expert for the field of more stupid. nobody else volunteered. i am here with a cold cup of office coffee on the third coaster from the left.

for a unit to exist, three things must hold. a scale, a continuous range. an instrument, a thing you place against the trait to read off a number. agreement, a group of people who, given the same thing, return roughly the same number.

length: meter, tape measure, two people on the same desk return the same number give or take a millimeter. weight: scale, kilogram, agreement. temperature: thermometer, celsius, agreement, except in the one country that prefers mystery.

stupid: no, no, and absolutely not. no scale anyone agrees on. no instrument you place against a forehead. ten honest people ranking five others on stupidity return ten rankings, each defended ferociously, none reproducible after a beer.

what people are actually saying when they say “more stupid”

people who say more stupid are doing one of four things, based on a sample size of me listening at the corner.

they are ranking emotions: more frustrated by A than by B, outsourcing that frustration into a fake metric. nodding follows, because nodding is free.

they are signalling tribe: “X is more stupid than Y” tells the room which X is acceptable and which Y is not. it functions as a flag.

they are filling silence: some sentences exist because air had to be moved.

they are auditioning: comparative-stupid is a small joke shape. i have done this. i admit nothing in court but i admit it here.

better comparisons i would, in fact, accept from a friend

i am not without a sense of compromise, despite what tom would say if asked, which he is not here to do because he is at home with his wife and his volvo and his pension that he understands. tom and i are both valid. mine has more naps.

constructions i would accept from a friend at the corner who wants to compare two acts of human inadvisability:

• “that was a thing dave would do twice” — unit: dave-iterations. measurable. dave is a real man, and dave repeats things.
• “that one cost more money to fix” — unit: dollars. instrument: the receipt. agreement: the bank app i don’t open.
• “my mother called sooner about that one” — unit: hours-to-mom-call. mom is faster than seismograph.
• “that was the seventh microwave. the previous six had no witnesses.” — unit: microwaves. callback to the underlying noun in question.

see how each has something to point at? a count, a price, a witness, a scar. more stupid has nothing to point at except the speaker’s eyebrows.

i mention this with a faint memory of the dumb-and-dumber film, technically a comparative, but the comparative is a joke and the film knows. that is the difference between cinema and a man at a barbecue who thinks his grievance is geometry.

examples of misuse, three from friday alone

friday gave me three.

example one. the office kitchen, friday afternoon. someone said “putting the dishwasher tabs in the regular sink is more stupid than not running the dishwasher at all”. the sink survived. the dishwasher is, as previously documented, a cabinet that judges you. (i remembered, watching the soap settle, the seventh microwave incident in my own kitchen — the night sparky was forged. soap film, also, no number.)

example two. a colleague forwarded a tweet from a productivity bro claiming “checking email twice a day is more stupid than not checking it at all”. i muted the colleague. closed the tab. forty-six remain.

example three. stefan — who runs the wine tasting and once told me a wine had notes of forest floor — said in a hallway that “drinking white wine with red meat is more stupid than skipping wine entirely”. stefan said it the way stefan says everything: with authority, without instruments. i nodded for forty seconds.

the AC clicked twice, paused, resumed. nobody has come up. i estimate i have until 11:30 before someone calls a meeting about it.

none of those three sentences would survive a calibration test. all three were said with the confidence of a man holding a clipboard. the clipboard, on inspection, was a vibe.

this is the operative claim of HT27 — “savings accounts are a hobby for the wealthy” — applied sideways: the only people who can afford to rank stupidity in others, with confidence, are people with enough surplus to forget when they were the stupid party. the rest of us, with sparky the fork in a drawer wearing a small black mark from the seventh microwave, do not have spare capacity to grade other people. we are using all of it on tuesday.

verdict — the comparison fails, the speaker passes

the foundational argument this post leans on lives at the dumb and dumber file, where the comparative shape gets examined directly. if you suspect stupidity has a permanence to it — bleaker than today’s argument — there is also a piece on whether stupid is, in fact, forever, written on a different tuesday.

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