...to say "more soft" or "more firm" when you are expressing that one thing is either softer or firmer than another, or should you simply say "This is softer, that is firmer,"? There is an ad for an adjustable mattress that uses the two word comparitive and it bugs me something fierce that someone actually wrote this down, someone else approved it, a third party recorded it and no one noticed what I think is a graceless grammatical error. So, it it an error, or am I mistaken?

It's an interesting question. It all depends on what you mean by 'correct'; whether you're a 'prescriptive' or a 'descriptive' grammarian.

Presumably, the advertisers felt that they could get a better emphasis with 'more soft', than with 'softer'. According to the 'rules', it's incorrect - but one of the strengths of English is that its rules can be bent creatively. 'More soft' is understandable, and it doesn't sound barbaric.

To me, 'more soft' sounds OK (kinda), although, for some reason, 'more big' and 'more small' certainly don't. Perhaps Maiku will enlighten us.

MrsS I tend to agree that "more soft" and "more firm" just don't sound right. You would expect to see a child's vocabulary expressing those terms, but I think I'd also be surprised to see it in advertising.

I'm thinking that there probably are situations where "more" would sound ok, I just can't think of any at the moment.

Mrs. S. also mentions that the ad is 'recorded'. The rules for spoken English are different (some would say the rules are often broken in spoken English; others that spoken English is simply different from written English).

'More soft' might actually be necessary to make the point clearly, without resorting to something like 'one helluva lot softer'. The '...er' is obvious when written down, but easily missed when spoken.

There's a tradition of deliberate mistakes in advertising.

The signs outside a fruit-seller's store read "banana's", "apple's", "strawberrie's" and so on. One passer-by can't take it. He goes in and says, "Look, you do realise that those words are plurals, not possessives, don't you? There's no need for an apostrophe. It's just plain wrong."

"Oh, I know that," says the store-keeper, "You're about the hundredth person to come in and tell me. Now, what do you want to buy?"

If I was trying to sell mattresses, I would call them Sleep-E-Z or something. Persnickety grammarians would be so annoyed ('It should be Sleep-E-Zily!') that, when buying a mattress and bamboozled by overwhelming choice, they would remember this brand-name only.

Having said that, I know how Mrs S. feels, I think. I saw a new truck the other day, in company livery - shining, and beautifully executed. One sentence, written along the side, ended "...satisfying it's customers".

How many people must have seen and approved that? How annoyed would everyone have been, had the lettering been a little squint, or had the colour not been completely uniform? Yet, "it's" was OK.

As Newnickname has already said, softer is considered the correct form in standard English, but the form more soft is just as clear in meaning, and if people want to say that, I have no trouble with it.

The standard "rule" for comparative adectives in English is that the suffix -er is used only for one-syllable words or for two-syllable words ending in y (e.g. happy+-er ® happier.)
Otherwise, the rule calls for the use of "more."

But this "rule" is violated all over the place, and the violation goes in both directions, with no damage whatever to the integrity of the language. One of my undergraduate English professors was fond of using the comparative and superlative forms commoner and commonest, for example. At first I always thought he was saying communist.

I have seen the comparative with more used at times quite effectively, though technically incorrectly. In a sentence such as, "In fact, judging from his reaction, John seemed to be more glad than sad over the outcome," I think the unorthodox use of the more comparative adds a nice emphasis that would otherwise be missed.

A few years ago I got stuck in traffic behind a vehicle proclaiming that it came from "So-and-so's tyre and exhaust FITTNIG centre" (my emphasis). This must have been bad proof-reading rather than a deliberate error to make people remember the name. In any area there are several such centres, and the error did nothing to make one firm's name memorable.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll said.

Ewood, you might be amused by the sign I saw on the back of a lorry in Liverpool. Painted on the back was a plea "Gorrajobgizacall" to which some wit had written in the dust "Llanfair" in front and "gogogoch" at the end. It made me smile but I think the joke might not be understood by our TransAtlantic friends.