"more [adjective]" correction to "[adjectiver]er" sometimes results in clunky writing

[MaddyGuthridge]

What got flagged?

In modern English, it is more correct to use "more [adjective]" rather than "[adjective]er" in some cases.

Why is this incorrect?
In modern English, it is more correct to use "more [adjective]" rather than "[adjective]er" in some cases.

While the word "correcter" is technically a real word, it is used much less commonly, and feels clunky to me.

I noticed a similar issue for the following phrases:

• More pleasant
• More common (notably, to me, commoner reads as a noun, not an adjective)

Example of correct usage:

In modern English, it is more correct to use "more [adjective]" rather than "[adjective]er" in some cases.

Additional notes
My dialect is Australian English.

[hippietrail]

Yes I've thought out loud about this here or on Discord before. There are various cases:

• incomparable adjectives like "only"
• adjectives that only compare with "-er" and "-est" like "big"
• adjectives that only compare with "more" like "interesting"
• adjectives that compare both ways and both sound fine "gentle"
• adjectives that compare both ways but one seems a lot more natural or more common than the other

And that's apart from the various cases where adding -er or -est to an adjective results in a legit word that is either not an adjective, like "foreigner", or is both like "commoner" that you point out.

The way we handle similar things is to add "flags" to each entry in the dictionary. So the simplest solution would add two new flags, one meaning "compares with -er/-est" and one meaning "compares with more/most" - which would allow all four combinations.

But that wouldn't account for the edge cases where one doesn't sound quite right even if legit. We know there are ones with "-er" that don't sound quite right but maybe there are also ones that are legit with "more" but sounds more natural with "-er"?

[MaddyGuthridge]

That sounds like a pretty sensible idea. Another (potentially simpler) possibility is to have the correction check the resultant word: if the result can be used as an adjective (eg "smaller"), it is accepted, but if the result is only a noun (eg "foreigner"), then the correction is not proposed. Obviously that wouldn't work for cases where the word is technically valid, but feels clunky, as in the examples I listed above, but it could be a helpful start.

[hippietrail]

That sounds like a pretty sensible idea. Another (potentially simpler) possibility is to have the correction check the resultant word: if the result can be used as an adjective (eg "smaller"), it is accepted, but if the result is only a noun (eg "foreigner"), then the correction is not proposed.

Yes that's definitely doable and probably what I originally left out. I think I made "foreigner" an exception when I fixed it though so I better go back and check and implement the real fix as you've quite rightly suggested.
Turns out I was doing it that way but due to a quirk of Harper's dictionary's origins, "foreigner" was getting erroneously marked as an adjective as well as a noun. That was only half-fixed so I'll fix it properly now.

Obviously that wouldn't work for cases where the word is technically valid, but feels clunky, as in the examples I listed above, but it could be a helpful start.

Yes so far there's only been two false positives. "Foreigner" and during initial testing before that "humaner", which is a different case where both "human" and "humane" are valid adjectives and "humaner" is apparently a valid comparative, but only of "humane" - though even that sounds unnatural to me. It's been in Wiktionary for a decade though.