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Aug 10, 2002, 1:52pm

> Bad analogy, you can interchange them in a sentence and still have
> completely the same meanings. The other words you could not.

A word such as 'better' is used to compare one object to another. 'Best'
would be used in a group of objects (three or more), which can usually be
flagged by the understood or stated 'all'.

Example:
Out of the two, I have the better teacher.
Of all the teachers in the school, I have the best.
Patricia is the worst student in the class.
Patricia is worse at math lessons than George.

> I have the worse teacher.
> I have the worst teacher.
>
> They still mean the same thing. They can mean mine is a bad teacher or is
> more bad than yours.

As I said above, a sentence such as 'I have the worse teacher' would be a
comparison between two objects. Therefore, the sentences do not mean the
same thing if one takes the statement literally.

> I have the best teacher.
> I have the better teacher.
>
> We just changed the meaning completely.
> Let's try with the other 2 words:

If I understand you correctly (correct me if I'm wrong), you're saying that
in the above two sentences you changed the meaning completely by using
'best' and 'better' respectively, but with the 'worse' and 'worst' sentences
the meaning wasn't changed at all. Grammatically, this is incorrect.

> I have more than you do.
> I have most than you do.
>
> Does that work at all? I hope not. I guess that's my boonie blood
showing
> through y'all.

Quite right; it doesn't.

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