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alexandraerinI have received responses to my original post from more than one outraged grammarian who was linked to it by someone and decided to come in and school me. I tried responding to them, but I lost my patience with the very first one when it became apparent he had not actually read what I was saying, only responding to the fact that some ignorant person thought "fun" should be an adjective. The rest were much the same, all dumping links and snide attitude with no attempt to understand what the post was saying beyond the point that it was challenging what they think of as orthodoxy. More such responses arrived throughout the night while I slept, and I've received another one while I was typing this.
So the purpose of this post... made at six in the morning on a day wherein I have to catch a plane and I have not yet packed, and my laptop is freezing up on me... is to clear a few things up, to outline my argument a little more clearly and also specifically respond to the most common counterarguments. If anybody responds to this post in such a way that makes it clear that they have not actually read the post and are just regurgitating what a textbook or dictionary tells them to be true, or laughing at me for supposedly not knowing what the textbooks say, the comment will be deleted unscreened.
I know what the the allegedly authoritative sources have to say on the subject.
This is my considered response to them.
First, I'm not arguing that "fun" should be called an adjective because I think it should be one or because I want it to be, or because I dislike being told that "funner" and "funnest" aren't words. As I said in my previous post, "funner" looks wrong to me, too. (Incidentally, though, it doesn't look wrong to Chrome's spellcheck.)
Rather, I'm arguing that "fun" is already an adjective, a fact that any dispassionate lexicographer (note that I claim to be neither) can not help but notice when examining how it is used in everyday speech and writing. The only level on which this can be refuted is a rather shallow one that requires no analysis, and bears up under none:
"'Fun' isn't an adjective therefore it can't be used as one."
Except that it is, in the same way that "annoying", which is a verb in the sentence "My grammatical iconoclasm is annoying the pedants.", is an adjective in the sentence, "Pedantry is an annoying habit." In English, what part of speech a word is in a sentence is dependent on its position and usage, not its etymology. When we diagram a sentence with a gerund as the subject ("Running is fun."), we still label it as the subject and treat it as a noun even though we're using a word that is still principally a verb.
And it works. It works because our brains understand grammar (parts of speech and sentence structure) separately from the definition of words. When we encounter in Calvin and Hobbes the sentence "Verbing weirds language.", we don't need the cartoonist to pause and break it down for us even though two out of three words in that sentence are occupying non-standard positions and fulfilling non-standard functions. ("Verbing" as a gerund appears to be standard, except that "verb" is not formally a verb in the first place.)
In my original post I did not resort to a dictionary because that would undermine the point, but any decent dictionary acknowledges that "fun" is used as an adjective in phrases like "a fun time" or "a fun game".
I'm not engaging in a "No True Scotsman" argument there. Check your dictionary. Go ahead. Check it.
See what I mean? It's there. Adjective.
This usageis may be* labeled as non-standard or informal, of course, but no one who understands how to use a dictionary would think this means "informally, this usage of 'fun' is as an adjective, but we formally-educated types know it's really being used as a noun in that phrase." That would be ridiculous. Anybody who wants to argue that "fun" is not in widespread use as an adjective is arguing against the dictionary, and if anyone can argue that "fun" is only a noun without appealing directly or indirectly to the dictionary's authority I'll be impressed.
But of course, the responses I received did tell me that "fun" is not used as an adjective ever, no matter what I, the dictionary, or the entire English-speaking population of the earth might think.
So, what is it used as?
1. "Fun" is a predicate nominative.
This is the most common reply I got.
It takes six more syllables to tell me what my original post freely admitted: that "fun" originated as a noun, and usages like, "Well, that was fun." can still be read as using it as such.
I identify this as part of where fun-the-adjective comes from. "That was enjoyable." uses an adjective to describe "that". It's perfectly natural to read "That was fun." as an adjective, if "fun" is understood to be a quality that "that" possesses.
You can respond to this "Well, if you read it that way, you're wrong, because 'fun' isn't an adjective."
I'm not even going to argue with that. I think it's more useful and interesting to analyze how a word is being used than to look it up in a dictionary, see what abbreviation follows it, and declare that this must be the case, but I'm not going to argue with anyone who says "That was fun." is going Subject-linking verb-predicate nominative.
The usage as a noun is certainly not incorrect. The sentence parses fine either way.
The only reason I point out that it can be read as an adjective in a sentence like that is because it explains the rather widespread phenomenon (again, acknowledged by the dictionary) whereby "fun" is inarguably used as an adjective, as in "That was a fun time." and "He's a fun guy."
"Fun" is not a predicate nominative in those examples; it is an adjective.
(As an aside, one straw-grasping gentleman tried to inform me that examples like "That was fun." and "He's a fun guy." are non-standard because the pronouns lack antecedents and therefore the sentences must be rewritten entirely. This argument is obviously quite fatuous, as pronouns without explicit antecedents do not break a sentence in English, and even if they did, it's easy enough to drop those sentences into context where they have antecedents, or to replace the pronoun with a noun.
The fact that people resort to things like this to argue against fun-the-adjective shows the desperation underlying the argument. There's more on that below, in the conclusion of this post.)
When I pointed out that "fun" cannot be the predicate nominative in a sentence where "game" or "guy" is the predicate nominative and "fun" is modifying it, I was told the following:
2. "Fun game" is a compound noun, like "cheese shop" and "water pump", not an adjective and noun.
This one amuses me. Really, it does. How many people who think I'm talking out of my ass could bring themselves to say that with a straight face? The dictionaries acknowledge that this use is as an adjective, and even a little thought will reveal that this is correct. There's a fundamental difference between saying that a thing is a "fun thing" and saying a shop is a "cheese shop".
A cheese shop is not a shop that is cheesy; it is a shop of cheese.
A water pump is not a pump that has certain watery characteristics; it is a pump for water.
A mouse trap is not a trap that evinces qualities of being a mouse, literally or metaphorically (as in a "mousy brunette"); it is a trap that one sets against mice.
In a compound noun, in other words, both nouns retain their typical use of being a noun. This is so obvious that it should go without saying.
When we say that a person is a fun person or a game is a fun game or an event was a fun time, we are saying "This thing has a funnish quality about it."
Note that "funnish" isn't a word, but anybody who doesn't like "fun" being used as an adjective ought to prepare themselves to argue for its adoption. The reason "fun" is used as an adjective is because nature abhors a vacuum, and if we take fun-the-adjective off the table then we have one. Despite the fact that at least one dictionary puts the first definition of "funny" as "providing fun", "funny" has evolved to mean something more specific than the adjective form of being "fun". The only place most of us ever have or ever will experience "funny" being used in the sense of "like fun" is in the pages of Dr. Seuss, where "fun games that are funny" both stands out as a typical example of Seussian nonsense and still uses "fun" as an adjective.
This is worth highlighting: in the phrase "fun games that are funny" (which is contrasted with a "sun that is not sunny", making it clear that the good doctor intends to construct a tautology, not to say that these games are fun and also separately amusing in the modern sense), it is the use of "funny" as an adjective to mean "having the qualities of being fun" that stands out as wrong, not the use of "fun" to modify "games".
Now, there are some who would say that the solution to the lack of a proper adjective for "fun" is to rewrite any sentence to avoid it in formal writing. This is easily done, because English is such a flexible language that admits to many alternate constructions for any thought, but that very flexibility exposes the lie here. You don't do that in English. Our language is strictly plug-and-play. Words snap together into a sentence like LEGO brand building blocks snap together to form a castle or a pirate ship.
I'm not saying that there aren't any rules to English. I'm saying that the rules don't change based on the concepts we're dealing with. We have irregular verbs by the boatload, for instance but there is no verb that can't be put here or there in the sentence because of some obscure rule based on how it entered the language.
For the time being, rewriting sentences to avoid the need for a "fun-like" adjective will have to suffice for formal writing, sadly. I say "sadly" because any time that formal writing is that different from informal writing--I don't mean things like avoiding neologisms and slang, I mean structurally different--there is something seriously wrong. We're looking at a weakness in the language. I don't expect formal writing to instantly shift to accommodate every change in common usage. It couldn't. But when we have a structure that goes "Thing is a concept-like thing." that is perfectly valid for all concepts and all things, except in formal writing we have to detour to avoid some snare that only applies for one concept or one thing... well, that's just untidy.
(As another aside, it occurs to me as I'm writing this that perhaps some people who have made a study of English expect that the way in which the English-speaking population's understanding of the language grows and changes should mirror the way their own understanding has grown and change; i.e., the evolution of the language should tend to make it more and more like formal standard English all the time. This is, of course, not the case. It's not even possible. Formal English will always change to be more like the informal English of its era, as informal changes gain enough currency to be adopted first as de facto standards and then de jure standards... though properly speaking, English doesn't have any jure. It's just the facto, ma'am.)
Perhaps you might allow that an adjective form of "fun" would be useful but cannot be "fun" itself as "fun" is a noun.
To that I say first: why not? Words do double or triple duty in English all the time, and our brains parse them just fine. And even if we established a why, that leaves us with how.
How do you make an alternative adjective catch on? The very establishment that has resisted fun-the-adjective will resist you because that's the nature of such an establishment. The English-speaking public at large will think you're being silly, and want to know what's wrong with "fun".
Alternative adjectives like "funnish" or "fun-like" will never catch up to the head start that fun-the-adjective has. They sound awkward and contrived, whereas "fun" sounds easy and natural given our exposure to it as a very adjective-like predicate nominative. Fun-as-adjective is the opposite of a contrived solution, as it has arisen organically through common usage.
Note the tense: has arisen. This has happened. You can argue futilely for it to be undone, but you can't argue against is existence as if it were some hypothetical aspect of a distant possible future. It's here. Fun-as-an-adjective is here.
The dictionaries may call the adjectival use informal today, but I imagine that within ten years they won't. Two decades at the very extreme outside. The Oxford English Dictionary in 2031--if it exists in 2031--will label "fun" an adjective without hanging any adjectives on its use.
If it seems that I'm underestimating how slow such institutions are to acknowledge and codify this sort of change in the language, that's only because you're underestimating how long the process has been underway already.
We're not at the beginning of a shift in how "fun" is used.
We're witnessing the tail end of it. By specifying a decade or two, I'm being just conservative enough in my assumptions that I can speak with certainty. I expect it to happen sooner than that.
The fight against "fun" being used as an adjective was lost before the prescriptivist grammarians noticed that a war was even on. No power in heaven or on earth can make "fun" not be an adjective. If we eradicated it from the earth, it would be back inside of a single generation because it doesn't need any time to spread from point to point.
This isn't some contagion that crept in when one person got something wrong and then it spread. It is a usage that arises spontaneously everywhere. Its usage as an adjective flows too easily from its original standard usage as a noun, and it flows right into a gaping hole left in the language by the shift in the connotation of "funny". You can't fight that.
The fight against "funner" and "funnest", on the other hand, is still being waged. I deeply suspect that the learned resentment, the implanted pet peeve against those words is the only reason there's so much resistance to "fun" as an adjective.
If I'd said that any other word that does informal double duty is being used as another part of speech, I wouldn't have people tripping over themselves to say "NO IT ISN'T."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not standard."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not formal."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not correct."
It takes something special, something more, something deeper to make an educated and intelligent person look at the sentence "Super Mario 64 is an especially fun game." and try to argue that the word between the adverb "especially" and the noun "game" is anything other than an adjective, and yet that's exactly the sort of reaction my last post provoked.
Thus, I must concede that there is still sufficient resistance to "funner" and "funnest" that the dispute over them could linger on past the lifetime of anybody reading this.
But the point of my original post on this subject is that fighting against "funner" and "funnest" is not just a losing battle, it's a battle a grammarian shouldn't want to win. Because it will result in a situation decades from now where "fun" is taught to schoolchildren as an adjective, but an irregular one. The nice, clean rule that demarcates when we can use the -er/-est forms of superlatives will have an exception, and this exception will be as glaring and ugly and awkward as "funner" seems to be to you.
Please, think of the children. You don't have to use "funner" and "funnest" yourself. As I said in my previous post, there's no reason to think "more [adjective]" or "most [adjective]" is incorrect even for words that are short enough to take the -er/-est suffixes.You can keep saying "more fun" and "most fun".
Just restrain your impulse to correct people who, using "fun" as an adjective, follow the rules of standard English in forming comparatives and superlatives with monosyllabic adjectives and say "funner" and "funnest".
The future will thank you for it, and the present will appreciate it, too.
*I edited this part when it was pointed out to me that the reasonably venerable Merriam Webster dictionary lists "fun" as an adjective without any notation on use. I was pretty certain that some dictionaries had progressed to that point. I'm pleasantly surprised that this includes at least one big name.
So the purpose of this post... made at six in the morning on a day wherein I have to catch a plane and I have not yet packed, and my laptop is freezing up on me... is to clear a few things up, to outline my argument a little more clearly and also specifically respond to the most common counterarguments. If anybody responds to this post in such a way that makes it clear that they have not actually read the post and are just regurgitating what a textbook or dictionary tells them to be true, or laughing at me for supposedly not knowing what the textbooks say, the comment will be deleted unscreened.
I know what the the allegedly authoritative sources have to say on the subject.
This is my considered response to them.
First, I'm not arguing that "fun" should be called an adjective because I think it should be one or because I want it to be, or because I dislike being told that "funner" and "funnest" aren't words. As I said in my previous post, "funner" looks wrong to me, too. (Incidentally, though, it doesn't look wrong to Chrome's spellcheck.)
Rather, I'm arguing that "fun" is already an adjective, a fact that any dispassionate lexicographer (note that I claim to be neither) can not help but notice when examining how it is used in everyday speech and writing. The only level on which this can be refuted is a rather shallow one that requires no analysis, and bears up under none:
"'Fun' isn't an adjective therefore it can't be used as one."
Except that it is, in the same way that "annoying", which is a verb in the sentence "My grammatical iconoclasm is annoying the pedants.", is an adjective in the sentence, "Pedantry is an annoying habit." In English, what part of speech a word is in a sentence is dependent on its position and usage, not its etymology. When we diagram a sentence with a gerund as the subject ("Running is fun."), we still label it as the subject and treat it as a noun even though we're using a word that is still principally a verb.
And it works. It works because our brains understand grammar (parts of speech and sentence structure) separately from the definition of words. When we encounter in Calvin and Hobbes the sentence "Verbing weirds language.", we don't need the cartoonist to pause and break it down for us even though two out of three words in that sentence are occupying non-standard positions and fulfilling non-standard functions. ("Verbing" as a gerund appears to be standard, except that "verb" is not formally a verb in the first place.)
In my original post I did not resort to a dictionary because that would undermine the point, but any decent dictionary acknowledges that "fun" is used as an adjective in phrases like "a fun time" or "a fun game".
I'm not engaging in a "No True Scotsman" argument there. Check your dictionary. Go ahead. Check it.
See what I mean? It's there. Adjective.
This usage
But of course, the responses I received did tell me that "fun" is not used as an adjective ever, no matter what I, the dictionary, or the entire English-speaking population of the earth might think.
So, what is it used as?
1. "Fun" is a predicate nominative.
This is the most common reply I got.
It takes six more syllables to tell me what my original post freely admitted: that "fun" originated as a noun, and usages like, "Well, that was fun." can still be read as using it as such.
I identify this as part of where fun-the-adjective comes from. "That was enjoyable." uses an adjective to describe "that". It's perfectly natural to read "That was fun." as an adjective, if "fun" is understood to be a quality that "that" possesses.
You can respond to this "Well, if you read it that way, you're wrong, because 'fun' isn't an adjective."
I'm not even going to argue with that. I think it's more useful and interesting to analyze how a word is being used than to look it up in a dictionary, see what abbreviation follows it, and declare that this must be the case, but I'm not going to argue with anyone who says "That was fun." is going Subject-linking verb-predicate nominative.
The usage as a noun is certainly not incorrect. The sentence parses fine either way.
The only reason I point out that it can be read as an adjective in a sentence like that is because it explains the rather widespread phenomenon (again, acknowledged by the dictionary) whereby "fun" is inarguably used as an adjective, as in "That was a fun time." and "He's a fun guy."
"Fun" is not a predicate nominative in those examples; it is an adjective.
(As an aside, one straw-grasping gentleman tried to inform me that examples like "That was fun." and "He's a fun guy." are non-standard because the pronouns lack antecedents and therefore the sentences must be rewritten entirely. This argument is obviously quite fatuous, as pronouns without explicit antecedents do not break a sentence in English, and even if they did, it's easy enough to drop those sentences into context where they have antecedents, or to replace the pronoun with a noun.
The fact that people resort to things like this to argue against fun-the-adjective shows the desperation underlying the argument. There's more on that below, in the conclusion of this post.)
When I pointed out that "fun" cannot be the predicate nominative in a sentence where "game" or "guy" is the predicate nominative and "fun" is modifying it, I was told the following:
2. "Fun game" is a compound noun, like "cheese shop" and "water pump", not an adjective and noun.
This one amuses me. Really, it does. How many people who think I'm talking out of my ass could bring themselves to say that with a straight face? The dictionaries acknowledge that this use is as an adjective, and even a little thought will reveal that this is correct. There's a fundamental difference between saying that a thing is a "fun thing" and saying a shop is a "cheese shop".
A cheese shop is not a shop that is cheesy; it is a shop of cheese.
A water pump is not a pump that has certain watery characteristics; it is a pump for water.
A mouse trap is not a trap that evinces qualities of being a mouse, literally or metaphorically (as in a "mousy brunette"); it is a trap that one sets against mice.
In a compound noun, in other words, both nouns retain their typical use of being a noun. This is so obvious that it should go without saying.
When we say that a person is a fun person or a game is a fun game or an event was a fun time, we are saying "This thing has a funnish quality about it."
Note that "funnish" isn't a word, but anybody who doesn't like "fun" being used as an adjective ought to prepare themselves to argue for its adoption. The reason "fun" is used as an adjective is because nature abhors a vacuum, and if we take fun-the-adjective off the table then we have one. Despite the fact that at least one dictionary puts the first definition of "funny" as "providing fun", "funny" has evolved to mean something more specific than the adjective form of being "fun". The only place most of us ever have or ever will experience "funny" being used in the sense of "like fun" is in the pages of Dr. Seuss, where "fun games that are funny" both stands out as a typical example of Seussian nonsense and still uses "fun" as an adjective.
This is worth highlighting: in the phrase "fun games that are funny" (which is contrasted with a "sun that is not sunny", making it clear that the good doctor intends to construct a tautology, not to say that these games are fun and also separately amusing in the modern sense), it is the use of "funny" as an adjective to mean "having the qualities of being fun" that stands out as wrong, not the use of "fun" to modify "games".
Now, there are some who would say that the solution to the lack of a proper adjective for "fun" is to rewrite any sentence to avoid it in formal writing. This is easily done, because English is such a flexible language that admits to many alternate constructions for any thought, but that very flexibility exposes the lie here. You don't do that in English. Our language is strictly plug-and-play. Words snap together into a sentence like LEGO brand building blocks snap together to form a castle or a pirate ship.
I'm not saying that there aren't any rules to English. I'm saying that the rules don't change based on the concepts we're dealing with. We have irregular verbs by the boatload, for instance but there is no verb that can't be put here or there in the sentence because of some obscure rule based on how it entered the language.
For the time being, rewriting sentences to avoid the need for a "fun-like" adjective will have to suffice for formal writing, sadly. I say "sadly" because any time that formal writing is that different from informal writing--I don't mean things like avoiding neologisms and slang, I mean structurally different--there is something seriously wrong. We're looking at a weakness in the language. I don't expect formal writing to instantly shift to accommodate every change in common usage. It couldn't. But when we have a structure that goes "Thing is a concept-like thing." that is perfectly valid for all concepts and all things, except in formal writing we have to detour to avoid some snare that only applies for one concept or one thing... well, that's just untidy.
(As another aside, it occurs to me as I'm writing this that perhaps some people who have made a study of English expect that the way in which the English-speaking population's understanding of the language grows and changes should mirror the way their own understanding has grown and change; i.e., the evolution of the language should tend to make it more and more like formal standard English all the time. This is, of course, not the case. It's not even possible. Formal English will always change to be more like the informal English of its era, as informal changes gain enough currency to be adopted first as de facto standards and then de jure standards... though properly speaking, English doesn't have any jure. It's just the facto, ma'am.)
Perhaps you might allow that an adjective form of "fun" would be useful but cannot be "fun" itself as "fun" is a noun.
To that I say first: why not? Words do double or triple duty in English all the time, and our brains parse them just fine. And even if we established a why, that leaves us with how.
How do you make an alternative adjective catch on? The very establishment that has resisted fun-the-adjective will resist you because that's the nature of such an establishment. The English-speaking public at large will think you're being silly, and want to know what's wrong with "fun".
Alternative adjectives like "funnish" or "fun-like" will never catch up to the head start that fun-the-adjective has. They sound awkward and contrived, whereas "fun" sounds easy and natural given our exposure to it as a very adjective-like predicate nominative. Fun-as-adjective is the opposite of a contrived solution, as it has arisen organically through common usage.
Note the tense: has arisen. This has happened. You can argue futilely for it to be undone, but you can't argue against is existence as if it were some hypothetical aspect of a distant possible future. It's here. Fun-as-an-adjective is here.
The dictionaries may call the adjectival use informal today, but I imagine that within ten years they won't. Two decades at the very extreme outside. The Oxford English Dictionary in 2031--if it exists in 2031--will label "fun" an adjective without hanging any adjectives on its use.
If it seems that I'm underestimating how slow such institutions are to acknowledge and codify this sort of change in the language, that's only because you're underestimating how long the process has been underway already.
We're not at the beginning of a shift in how "fun" is used.
We're witnessing the tail end of it. By specifying a decade or two, I'm being just conservative enough in my assumptions that I can speak with certainty. I expect it to happen sooner than that.
The fight against "fun" being used as an adjective was lost before the prescriptivist grammarians noticed that a war was even on. No power in heaven or on earth can make "fun" not be an adjective. If we eradicated it from the earth, it would be back inside of a single generation because it doesn't need any time to spread from point to point.
This isn't some contagion that crept in when one person got something wrong and then it spread. It is a usage that arises spontaneously everywhere. Its usage as an adjective flows too easily from its original standard usage as a noun, and it flows right into a gaping hole left in the language by the shift in the connotation of "funny". You can't fight that.
The fight against "funner" and "funnest", on the other hand, is still being waged. I deeply suspect that the learned resentment, the implanted pet peeve against those words is the only reason there's so much resistance to "fun" as an adjective.
If I'd said that any other word that does informal double duty is being used as another part of speech, I wouldn't have people tripping over themselves to say "NO IT ISN'T."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not standard."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not formal."
They'd say, "Yes, but that's not correct."
It takes something special, something more, something deeper to make an educated and intelligent person look at the sentence "Super Mario 64 is an especially fun game." and try to argue that the word between the adverb "especially" and the noun "game" is anything other than an adjective, and yet that's exactly the sort of reaction my last post provoked.
Thus, I must concede that there is still sufficient resistance to "funner" and "funnest" that the dispute over them could linger on past the lifetime of anybody reading this.
But the point of my original post on this subject is that fighting against "funner" and "funnest" is not just a losing battle, it's a battle a grammarian shouldn't want to win. Because it will result in a situation decades from now where "fun" is taught to schoolchildren as an adjective, but an irregular one. The nice, clean rule that demarcates when we can use the -er/-est forms of superlatives will have an exception, and this exception will be as glaring and ugly and awkward as "funner" seems to be to you.
Please, think of the children. You don't have to use "funner" and "funnest" yourself. As I said in my previous post, there's no reason to think "more [adjective]" or "most [adjective]" is incorrect even for words that are short enough to take the -er/-est suffixes.You can keep saying "more fun" and "most fun".
Just restrain your impulse to correct people who, using "fun" as an adjective, follow the rules of standard English in forming comparatives and superlatives with monosyllabic adjectives and say "funner" and "funnest".
The future will thank you for it, and the present will appreciate it, too.
*I edited this part when it was pointed out to me that the reasonably venerable Merriam Webster dictionary lists "fun" as an adjective without any notation on use. I was pretty certain that some dictionaries had progressed to that point. I'm pleasantly surprised that this includes at least one big name.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2011-02-23 12:35 pm (UTC)Merriam Webster
on 2011-02-23 01:51 pm (UTC)1: providing entertainment, amusement, or enjoyment
2: full of fun : pleasant
there is no note about it being informal () ()
no subject
on 2011-02-23 01:56 pm (UTC)