Righting “More Wrong” and “Wronger”

When my boys were in elementary school, they came to me with a grammar question, “Mom, we’re having a grammar argument. Is it wronger or more wrong?”

The boys had picked up on an exception to the rule for grading adjectives, that is making an adjective comparative or superlative, and found it something to argue about.

The general rule is that words of one syllable take one of the inflectional suffixes, either –er or –est:

Slow—slower—slowest

Words of more than one syllable can take e...