From English with Alex:
I have often said that language is democratic. This means that the speakers of a particular language ultimately get to decide which words and phrases are accepted in communication, and which words and phrases are considered out of fashion. Before you roll your eyes and accuse me of saying that language does not have any rules, and that people can say whatever they want, remember that languages evolve over time, and that common usage and what people actually say will trump grammar books almost every time, and that new words and word uses get added to dictionaries all the time regardless of you feel about them. This is certainly the case in the debate over “funner” and “more fun.” So, before we answer the question “Which one should I use?”, we need to travel back in time to understand how this funny debate started.
History: The beginning of “fun” Today, we use “fun” as both a noun and an adjective. You can have fun (noun form) or have a fun time (adjective form). Even if some dictionaries list the adjectival form of “fun” as “casual,” every modern dictionary recognizes both uses. But this has not always been the case. So, let’s have some fun and look back at some history. To begin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary,”fun” actually started as a verb meaning “to cheat, joke, or jest.” The earliest documented use the OED has of “fun” as a verb dates back to 1685. No, I’m not funning with you.
Our usage of “fun” as a noun meaning “enjoyment” or “pleasure” first appeared in the early 1700s. The word kept this meaning and usage for over 100 years. Then, in the early 1800s, publications on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean started using “fun” as an adjective as well. And if it was being used in magazines, then it was definitely being used in pubs and factories. Not everyone agreed with this usage, of course. As has often been the case throughout history, people in upper classes, or simply those who thought that “proper language” had to be protected and preserved, frowned upon the usage of “fun” as an adjective. But, as is also often the case, that did not stop people from using it. And as more people used it, and as “fun” became accepted as an adjective (“a fun time,” “a fun show,” “a fun concert”), people naturally started wondering, “What are the comparative and superlative forms of ‘fun’?” So, in the late 1800s, we started seeing “funner” and “funnest” appear in print.
Why “funner” and “funnest”? Going by comparative and superlative adjective rules, “funner” and “funnest” make sense. The general rule is that regular one-word adjectives are transformed into their comparative forms by adding -er, and into their superlative forms by adding -est. For example, small becomes smaller and smallest, cold becomes colder and coldest, fine becomes finer and finest, and so on. But “funner” sounds a little strange, doesn’t it? For example, “Brenda’s party was funner than Julia’s.”
“Hmm,” said the grammarians. “Why not make fun an exception?” This meant putting “fun” in the category of two-word adjectives that don’t end in -y, such as daring and careful, and three-word-or-more adjectives such as courageous and ridiculous?”
In these cases, English speakers add “more” for comparatives, and “most” for superlatives. For instance, more daring and most daring. So, even though it is a one-syllable adjective, let us add it to the “more” and “most” category because “more fun” and “most fun” just sound better, don’t they?
…Do they? And this is the debate we have been having for decades.
Link to the rest at English with Alex
I grew up in a part of the USA that has particularly odd ways of phrasing – the widespread use of prepositions at the end of sentences, for example, or the use of ‘soda’ to describe the carbonated beverages.
Here’s a more technical explanation of some of the oddities of pronunciation – https://infogalactic.com/info/Inland_Northern_American_English#Phonology_and_phonetics
Some distinctive Cleveland phrases (my hometown) – https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/ohio/cleveland/cleveland-phrases/
Having grown up nearly my entire life in that larger geographic area, I had NO idea how odd our accent and word choices sounded to others until I moved to South Carolina. The students I taught and their families must have had a challenging time understanding me (as, sometimes, I did them). The school I taught bordered on the SC Gullah accent territory, so there was another language gap to deal with when encountering the older citizens (accents are distinctly faded since the advent of television).
Terminal prepositions are not odd. They are perfectly normal English, and have been for centuries. In the 17th century John Dryden concluded that this is bad grammar because they don’t occur in Latin. The close observer will note that English and Latin are different languages, but no mind. He went back to his earlier writings and edited them to remove terminal prepositions, and this bogus rule of English grammar entered the popular consciousness.
A good rule of thumb is that if a native English speaker has to consciously learn a rule of grammar and is prone to violating it in moments of forgetfulness, it is almost certainly a bogus rule. This isn’t to say that there are no rules. Every language is chock full of rule. Native speakers learn these as toddlers, but they can give fits to second language learners. Think of how a native Russian speaker has trouble with the definite article when speaking English. A native English speaker just knows when to use the definite article (though when this is varies with dialect). To the Russian speaker it is arbitrary and nearly impossible to get right.