"More and more less confident"
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From Adam Rasgon and Natan Odenheimer, "U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem Braces for Possible Israeli Strike on Iran" NYT 6/12/2025:
More recently, however, Mr. Trump has said he was less convinced that talks with Iran would yield a new nuclear deal.
“I’m getting more and more less confident about it,” he told The New York Post in a podcast broadcast on Wednesday.
Here's the podcast on YouTube. The quoted phrase is from around 35:08:
uh I'm f- I'm getting more and more less confident about it
"More and more less ADJ" is Out There — e.g. COCA has
Obama should stick to reality, but that appears more and more less likely from him.
Kids are becoming more and more less active and using their imagination less and less.
I haven't found (or thought up) any examples of "less and less more ADJ". And I think there's a semantico-pragmatic reason for the fact that "more and more less ADJ" is more plausible than "less and less more ADJ". But working out the formal logic is giving me a headache, so I'll leave it to the commenters.
Ethan A Merritt said,
June 12, 2025 @ 7:21 pm
Second derivative of probability vs time? "Less and less more probable" would mean the probability is still rising, but rising less rapidly than before. "More and more less probable" is messier, but I would take it as meaning that the probability has been decreasing for a while but now is now decreasing at a faster rate. Strangely, in both cases the meaning would seem to be that the 2nd derivative is negative.
AntC said,
June 12, 2025 @ 8:42 pm
As at three months ago, that the Courts would prevail over Trump's illegal acts was looking more likely, with even the Supreme Court upholding the Rule of Law. As time has gone on, and Pam Bondi is acting merely as a mouthpiece for the President, that's looking less and less more likely.
Chester Draws said,
June 12, 2025 @ 11:18 pm
Yet "increasingly less confident" is unremarkable. Even though "increasingly" and "more and more" are pretty much synonymous.
Gregory Kusnick said,
June 13, 2025 @ 12:38 am
I'm inclined to read "X is more and more less Y" as shorthand for "It is more and more true/frequent/noteworthy that X is less Y."
rosie said,
June 13, 2025 @ 12:48 am
"Decreasingly" is rarer than "increasingly", so perhaps people are likelier to think of "increasingly less Adj" than of "decreasingly Adj". How come? Perhaps it's to do with the process of finding words to express ideas. The idea of the amount of something changing over time is enough to trigger "increasingly", but, to choose "decreasingly", you'd have to also know that what increases is negative in nature.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 13, 2025 @ 7:00 am
Possibly related, but is it pointing in the other direction? The google books ngram viewer shows "less and less common" appearing with higher frequency than "more and more uncommon" consistently since circa 1850, with the gap widening over the last three-plus decades. OTOH "rarer and rarer" is generally roughly equal to or greater than "less and less common" in frequency.
Robert Coren said,
June 13, 2025 @ 9:10 am
"More and more, I'm feeling less confident" seems reasonably normal to me, and I can see how it could be condensed into the quoted text.
Tom said,
June 14, 2025 @ 12:26 am
I think that construction happens when a speaker gets to the point in a sentence at which a negation is called for but doesn't recall the negation in the moment. The sentences should be
I'm getting more and more unconfident about it.
that appears more and more unlikely
kids are more and more inactive
The opposite construction "less and less more" will occur less frequently because the speaker is not as likely to fail to use the non-negated form of a word.
David Marjanović said,
June 14, 2025 @ 6:39 am
The intonation is compatible with "I'm getting, more and more, less confident about it" – meaning "as time goes on, I'm getting ever less confident about it", I suppose.
Philip Anderson said,
June 14, 2025 @ 7:29 am
@Chester Draws
I disagree that "increasingly" and "more and more" are synonymous; the former is an adverb, while the latter is a comparative, and combines with an adjective.
Therefore “Increasingly good” is fine, while “more and more good” is just sub-standard; it has to be “better and better” for me. YMMV.
“More and more less” combines two opposing comparatives, which seems weird, although less so than “less and less more”.
Yves Rehbein said,
June 15, 2025 @ 8:06 am
more-less is a short form of more or less. The fixed order of this expression, arbitrary as it is, still might say something about the semantico-pragmatic reason for the impression that "less and less more ADJ" is implausible.
I am less sure if a phraseological derivation from more or less works. I mean, I'm more less confident about it.
KevinM said,
June 15, 2025 @ 4:39 pm
I think the speaker is conceiving of less-confident as a unitary expression meaning "unsure". Or else just changing courses mid-sentence, as we do when speaking off the cuff.