I gotta side with Rosalinas. I remember this used to bother me even as a kid, but as tended to be the case, pointing it out to other kids usually didn’t help. One of my least fond memories of childhood wasn’t that children didn’t know better, as you say, to some degree that is the nature of being a child. It was how willfully and proudly ignorant so many of my peers were, that they almost held ignorance as a virtue to aspire to and protect against all attempts to educate. Now that I’m an adult... it’s pretty much the same, but less rhymes and more emails blaming someone else. Drat.
Misunderstanding of English. “Yours is better? Mine is MORE better!” : “I need more better activities.” The first one- more modifies the word “better.” It increases the amount of better. More is a true false statement. Better is a true false statement. You are saying your true is true. In the second- more modifies the subject, “activities.” It lacks an Oxford comma but can be read as: “I need more, better activities.” You have said that you need additional better activities, not that you need activities that are better than better. The first is blatantly incorrect in formal grammar. The second is unpalatable grammatically but is not strictly incorrect. Think of “infinity plus 2.” Infinity is a concept, like better, or a modified word like “smarter.” It desvrodes a relationship and not a quantifiable figure. So using infinity to demonstrate- you can have a greater infinity than my infinity, such as scalable infinity- but you cannot have infinity plus 2 because you can’t modify...
... a concept with a number. It’s fundamentally flawed, like trying to describe a number as color (a color can be described as a number though!) So it’s like saying: “Blue plus 2=X.” It’s nonsense. Now- grammar changes through use, formal grammar less than informal, but both change. Through use “more better” could become accepted grammar, but speakers of formal grammar will generally see such usages as an afront to a language, or as a sign of lack of education or care. The modifier and modified are important to distinguishing the case. “Happier” means “more happy.” “More happier” as in “I’m more happier than you” is me saying I’m “more more happy.” If you can’t picture yourself saying “more more happy/smart/etc.” then “more happier” is equally incorrect in garammar. Saying “we want more happier people” means you want more people who are happier, again not perfect but we are modifying “people” with more and not happier.
Hence the relation to perceived intelligence. A person aware of the meanings of words and the rules of sentence structure would puzzle out the logic of such constructs, and determine they are illogical by nature. Someone who doesn’t either doesn’t know or doesn’t care to use logic or thought in constructing a sentence, and if someone doesn’t care enough to think about what they are saying, it can be taken as a sign that perhaps you shouldn’t care much about what they are saying either. Obviously this applies less to non native speakers, who likely have higher command of their own language, or others who may have reason to be unable to apply such thought. It’s also important that while language evolves, key to this evolution is that we don’t simply accept anything said as “correct” as that creates ambiguity and decentralized dialects that hinder the ability to understand people speaking “the same language.”
“More” is sometimes used informally to amplify a word like “better” aka “marketing speak” when someone REALLY wants to make it clear that something isn’t just better, but so much better (or intense.) While it may be understood by the listener- that does not make it proper grammar, and the fact that the best words a person could think of amongst any modifiers or adjectives in the English language was “more,” may again be perceived as someone not having a firm grasp of language or vocabulary. People are free to speak as they like. If I say: “guest_ much more likening um mo scooby doop delicious French fries food” you may or may not understand me, you may or may not think poorly of me. But I can say that instead of “I like French fries” if I wish. We can argue over wether I’m wrong, or dumb, or etc for saying it, but most people don’t argue over how you speak, they just form a judgment about you and your intelligence based on how you speak and what you say, and you’re the one that effects
Are you sure they're the stupid one? Are you fucking sure!?
Not "more stupider"