I heard someone say “messier” the other day, and it made me wonder about the various versions of the adjective “messy”.

We can say that X is “messy”.

We can compare X to something else and say that X is “messier” than the other.

We can compare X to everything else and say that X is “messiest”.

However, there are no modifiers of the adjective “messy” when going in the other direction.

Instead, we have:

• X is “less messy” than something else.
• X is the “least messy” of them all.

I find it interesting that modifiers of adjectives in English do not have this bidirectional symmetry.

I suspect that this asymmetry must give some native speakers of other languages difficulty when they are learning English.