funner, funnest

Know what I think is fun? Playing with words. A pun is fun. Scrabble is funner. But tweaking priggish prescriptivists is funnest.

Funner? Funnest? If you do a Google search on “not a word,” funner will show up pretty early. There are many people who are determined to make sure that others know that funner is not a word – and funnest isn’t either. To them, funner is unfair and funnest is downright funest.

They’re obviously wrong. I just used those words, as many others have, and you just understood them, as many others have. They’re the comparative and superlative forms of the adjective fun. Is fun an adjective? Of course it is. It’s been used as an adjective for well over a century. Prescriptivist has only been in use about half as long, since the 1950s, but I bet you didn’t say it wasn’t a word!

Of course, that’s part of the problem: fun has been around a long time… as a noun. And a verb. So the adjective form that showed up by the late 1800s seemed like a new upstart, and it has carried that stigma in the minds of people who long for the simplicity of a time when we had no mobile phones, no televisions, no cars, and the infant mortality rate was over 20%. They don’t necessarily want to restore that infant mortality rate… except when it comes to words, where they would like to smother nearly all the neonates. Even among those who have come to (perhaps grudgingly) accept fun as an adjective, there is a frequent reaction against funner and funnest: this upstart doesn’t merit inclusion in the grand old set of single-syllable adjectives that can be modified like that!

I can’t change the fact that some people see language as a means of expressing and enforcing a simple, simplistic, inflexible order – both mental and social. Such people tend to see fun as the opposite of adult. Or they would if they accepted fun as an adjective. The only fun they want is in fundamentals (and somehow those fundamentals have been pulled right out of their own fundaments). Well, real adults know how to have good fun and do fun things. And I guarantee you that playful people have far funner lives than prigs do. And accomplish more useful things too.

People of the priggish bent, being authoritarian, naturally do not wish to admit lexemes to recognized wordhood just on the strength of people actually using them. We can safely say they would sooner make such people non-persons than allow “non-words” to be words. So they will point to dictionaries. Dictionaries are meant to be field guides, documenting the language but always following popular usage, but many people think they are legislation, and a word not in the dictionary is not a word at all.

Well. I can flip open my handy Scrabble dictionary (published by Merriam-Wesbter) and find before me funner and funnest. Do you not accept the authority of the Scrabble dictionary? Very well. Open your Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (or visit it online, as I just have) and see “fun adjective” with the note “sometimes fun•ner; sometimes fun•nest” – or go to dictionary.com and see it as an adjective with funner and funnest listed as comparative (and superlative). Happy now?

You’re happy now if you were hoping for that outcome, of course. But if you’re of the priggish authoritarian bent, this is likely where you reveal that you are selective with authorities. These modern dictionaries! They have disgraced themselves! You know better. Which somehow means you accept less into your mind.

But limitation is not a virtue. Being able to do less with language is not a good thing, unless you think self-abusively following needlessly restrictive dogma as a sign of obedience is a good thing. I don’t. In my view, creation is the obvious point of existence: new things, new variations, new arrangements. Not chaos but new connections. And the way to create is to play and discover. To have fun. Not a rock-star room-trashing party (no one really does that with language, not even teens) but a collage, a mobile, a fantastical garden. Indeed, the people who truly understand a subject are, in my experience, the ones who have the most fun with it… and are, consequently, the funnest people. Sometimes the funniest, too.