I was on the point of leaving the house Thursday for the Editors' Association of Canada's Editing Goes Global conference when John Avila posted on Facebook, "John McIntyre, I need your help here."
He was involved in a Facebook exchange with a lady, who had written, "Stupidest is not a word. The correct statement would be 'the most stupid.' "
She explained further: "The superlative of stupid is most stupid. Dictionaries prior to the 1980's did not even show this word. Unfortunately, our language has been so brutalized by those who choose not to learn proper grammar we are stuck with stupidest and of course my all time favorite irregardless. I hope that answers your question John Avila Dds and thanks for asking."
This is too choice a specimen to pass up. It is a classic example of the way the peeververein operate: misinformed assertion, amplified by unreliable information, coupled with a smug assumption that anyone who thinks otherwise is ignorant/careless/sloppy/unworthy. Let's get into the particulars.
The lady undermines her own statement that stupidest is not a word by telling us that it means "most stupid." That is, she evidently understands that it is the superlative form of the adjective stupid, and she presumably recognized that it is formed in the regular English manner by adding the suffix –est to the root word.
But wait, there's more.
I can't fully evaluate her assertion that dictionaries prior to 1980 did not list the word, in part because not all dictionaries list the comparative and superlative when they are formed regularly. I can attest that American Heritage, Concise Oxford, and New Oxford American list the –est form without comment.
Barrie England chimed in to point out that the Corpus of Contemporary American English has 187 citations of stupidest from the period 1990-2012. I checked, and the Corpus of Historical American English has 132, with authors including Elinor Wylie and James Fenimore Cooper, and publications such as the Atlantic, Harper's, and the American Whig Review. Jeremy Wheeler chimed in with citations from Joseph Conrad, A.A. Milne, and Mark Twain.
The Oxford English Dictionary has 22 citations for stupidest, a good handful of them from the nineteenth century, including one from Thomas Carlyle's Reminiscences.
So stupidest is by all measures a word, and one with a history. I can't recall ever having used it myself, and I would usually prefer not to. It looks casual and non-standard. Presumably that is what Ms. Smith objects to. Happily, neither of us is obliged to use it.
What I object to is her brandishing a more or less innocuous word to disparage other people's intelligence, breeding, and education, and extrapolating from that word to claim wildly that English is being brutalized. It is just about the ignorantest way of talking about language I can imagine.