
Worst Comes to Worst? Or Worse Comes to Worst?
Posted by June on March 20, 2023LABELS: COPY EDITING, GRAMMAR, WORSE COMES TO WORST VS WORST COMES TO WORST
I try not to cringe when people use language in a way that seems wrong to me. My idea of what’s right, as I’ve learned the hard way, isn’t necessarily right. So who am I to judge? But though I can hold my tongue, I can’t just turn off my cringe impulse at will, as evidenced by my reaction when I hear people say, “If worst comes to worst.”
To me, that first T is like nails on a chalkboard. How can worst come to worst, I wonder, if it’s already worst? Clearly, the fear is that something already bad — a worse thing — could go even further downhill, all the way to its worst possible state. So obviously, people who use two “worsts” in this expression are botching up the logical original wording, “if worse comes to worst.”
So I scoffed and I sniffed and I silently judged every time I heard the version with two “worsts” until the year 2023 when, after about 20 years of writing about grammar, I finally looked it up.
Good thing I held my tongue. “The traditional idiom, evidenced by the Oxford English Dictionary consistently from the 16th century, is worst comes to worst,” writes Garner’s Modern English usage.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage reports that the expression “worst comes to worst” seems to have first appeared in print in 1597, its meaning identical to the way people use it now: “if the worst that can possibly happen does happen.” It wasn’t till more than a century later that the expression I assumed was the original, “worse comes to worst,” appeared in print.
“Presumably it was the desire to make the phrase more logical that gave rise to the variant ‘if the worse comes to the worst,’ which was first recorded in 1719, when it was used (in the past tense) by Daniel Defoe in ‘Robinson Crusoe,’” Merriam’s writes.
Interestingly, when I searched a version of “Robinson Crusoe” online, I found on page 183 “if the worst came to the worst” — with two Ts — meaning that sometime between the publication of the edition Merriam-Webster referenced and the edition I saw, someone had changed Defoe’s “worse” to “worst” in order to make it correct according to the standards of his time.
This back-and-forth supports Merriam’s central point about the two forms of this expression: “In the centuries since, this phrase has shown a stubborn unwillingness to settle into fixed form.”
Here's more in my recent column.

- Worst Comes to Worst? Or Worse Comes to Worst?
March 20, 2023 - 'Aren't I' is ungrammatical, so why is it OK?
March 20, 2023 - Feel positively or feel positive? Why the New York Times made the wrong call
March 13, 2023 - Different Spellings for the Same Word?
March 13, 2023 - Is the older of two also the oldest of two?
February 27, 2023


June Casagrande is a writer and journalist whose weekly grammar/humor column, “A Word, Please,” appears in community newspapers in California, Florida, and Texas. more


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Some Common Editing Errors: Altar, Forgo, Palate
Eli Murphy It's great that you thought of this and pointed out the simple editing mistakes. I can understand that each editor has a particular responsibility; they are not expected to be experts in all facets of language, grammar, copy editing, or word choice. Instead, he or she is in charge of the entire department, choosing the stories, delegating writing to writers, procuring images, etc. I appreciate that you recently talked about errors that even competent editors occasionally make. https://www.editage.com/services/english-editing/copy-editing-services
Subject-verb agreement in the real world
Meredith MC Shouldn’t the writer have put dashes (or maybe parentheses) before “commonly” and after “owned” ? This would have eliminated the confusion for both writer and reader.
Real editing notes I gave to real writers
Eli Murphy Well, kudos to you for providing the essential elements and imparting your knowledge in the form of notes for novice writers on one of the most crucial components, "editing." I hope it will be helpful to everyone who is looking for a way. https://www.editage.com/services/english-editing
The couple is or the couple are?
E. Raufert It has to be said: You're commenting on a fine point of grammar, but you're conjuring up wrong and bad sentences to try to explain them. First, you open with two sentence fragments.: "The couple is going to purchase the house? Or the couple are going to purchase the house?" No, everyone doesn't do it, yes, you did make a mistake. No, it's not just some question of writing style. Yes, even though you've gotten paid to do editing work. You followed up your opening errors with quotation marks around words that aren't a quotation. Your writing goes on to be consistently vague because you leave words out. I can only guess that you may be a youngster who grew up texting in the pre-speech-recognition era when kids decided it was too much trouble to thumb-type all the words. Most importantly, you wrote your piece for an American website, but you instructed its American readers to choose to use an England-only form of expression four times. It actually is simply wrong here in the U.S. Here are some examples: "The family are all","The staff are experts". No, that's not just my opinion, it's the opinion of countless reference books and textbooks. Thank you for trying, but please do fix those mistakes. They're mistakes. This leaves the question of what to do to fix yourself. You may think that I believe you should beat your brains out hammering away at reference books, but I couldn't possibly disagree with that approach more. It didn't work the first time. You may even be making mistakes because you overstudied. You need a steady diet of professional writers who do speak English correctly, and they have to be very, very good writers, or you won't read 'em. I hate to say it, but you won't find it in the work of The New York Times' new infestation of dopey, cheaper White kids. The Atlantic and The New Yorker aren't usually too bad, but I think you might actually love to read "Depth Takes a Holiday" or anything by Susan Gregory Thomas, esp. her "Broke-Ass Grouch" work. I'm not going to close by saying, "Good luck", I'm going to close by saying,"Get over yourself, even though people have paid you to edit, and get to work!"
A Reminder About "John and I" vs. "John and Me"
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