Comparitive and superlative

One of the quirks of the English language that is dying out is the difference between the comparative and the superlative. Here's how the difference works: Suppose your significant other wants help in choosing a new pair of pants (note how gender neutral this all is?). Now, the SO shows you two pair and asks, "Which pair do you like most?"
That's "wrong" (please note quotation marks). It should be, "Which pair do you like more?"
When discussing two things, we use the comparative: more, better, bigger. It is only when we move to three or more things that we use the superlative: most, best, biggest. Suffice it to say that the usage is dying because it's not very useful.
Normally I can usually think of some historical reason why a really silly rule should be in place, but this one defies any explaining. There are a number of languages in the world that have a kind of three-tiered system for numbering things. It goes one, two, many, as if -- once we get beyond two -- it's just not worth it to be specific. I don't think that's the case here, but with language you never know.
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Evolution

I was listening to an old recording of Maybelle Carter singing "Wildwood Flower," the other day, and she sang, "I woke from my dream and all idols was clay." What interests me was not the subject/verb agreement (this is Bluegrass, after all), but the "idols was clay." This is an evolution in language.
The original passage is from the Old Testament, and relates to a vision of a statue, and idol, with golden head, silver shoulders, and so on down the torso, until the feet, which were of clay. The vision typifies the "golden age" hypothesis, which states that things were better back then, and got worse as we neared the present, where things are miserable.
The meaning of the idol shifted somewhat through history, coming to mean, in the 20th century, that an idol had "feet of clay," meaning that an admired person had a serious flaw.
As Mother Maybelle sings it, the meaning has shifted again. Now it means that anything which we thought was good has gone bad.
This is the way language works. The shift is not good, not bad, just there.

Spell Check as the Curse of Humankind

Here's a headline from the Money section of the Feb 3 Salt Lake Tribune. Bennett: Ruling won't give big business undo campaign sway.
Did you spot it? The word should be undue, or more than is appropriate. As it stands, the headline seems to say that business might have the power to dismantle campaigns. Well, maybe that's true too.
In this case, the culprit is spell check, which causes us to pay attention only to those words that have the little red squiggly line under them.
So, we need rules for using spell check. I know two:
1) Spell check doesn't cover all words; just the ones in the lexicon. So, unusual words or proper nouns are frequently underlined. The problem is that we often assume that a proper noun, say the name Noam Chomsky, though underlined, is spelled correctly. But all the spell check does is compare the spelling with words in its data banks. It will underline both Noam and Naom. The way to fix this is to put such words into the computer's lexicon and then any deviations will show up. If I put Noam in, then Noam will show up underlined in squiggly red.
2) Spell check won't find words that are correct but spellings different from the one you wanted to use. Undue/undo, and a host of others. Someone, a human preferably, needs to make sure that the computer hasn't missed anything.
Which in the case of today's Tribune, didn't happen.