Fail as an adjective

[Gerald Cohen]

I missed the earlier discussion on ³fun² as an adjective. But isn¹t this
usage directly traceable to the speech  of children?

G. Cohen


On 7/10/09 9:31 AM, "Jonathan Lighter" <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM> wrote:

> 
> "Funner" and "funnest": freshman faves since at least 1976, in my personal
> experience.
> JL
> On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
> 

>> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> --
>> 
>> On Jul 10, 2009, at 6:01 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> At 7/10/2009 05:12 AM, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>>>> Or is it that 'so' has become an all-purpose intensifier that goes
>>>> with
>>>> nouns as well as adjectives?
>>> 
>>> Like "It was so fun."
>> 
>> not really.
>> 
>> we've covered the case of "fun" here several times in the past.  the
>> summary is that alongside the noun "fun" an adjective "fun" has
>> developed for many speakers (to the grave dismay of many commenters).
>> (in previous discussion, we looked at possible routes to this
>> development.)
>> 
>> we then get the adjective "fun" with the full range of degree
>> modifiers (e.g., "very fun"), and some speakers have an inflectional
>> comparative ("funner") and superlative ("funnest"). (the noun "fun"
>> continues in use, as in "it was a lot of fun".)
>> 
>> arnold

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