Grammar girl here. Last week, I was on NPR's talk of the nation, and I thought the interview

went well until the last thing out of my mouth. I said, words are fun. And then I cringed

because that's a controversial use of the word fun. Some of you are probably saying,

darn right, and the rest of you probably don't see what's wrong with it. Here's why words

are fun is controversial. Everyone agrees that fun can be a noun. It's been used that

way since the 1700s. For example, if you say she sings for fun, or she sings for money,

fun and money are both nouns. When you say we had fun, it's the grammatical equivalent

of we had pudding. And again, fun and pudding are both nouns. Money and pudding may be more

concrete than fun. People at the same party may disagree about whether they had fun, whereas

they'd probably all agree that they had pudding and the singer made $50, but fun,

pudding and money are all nouns. When you start using fun as an adjective, however,

some people think the fun has stopped. Some dictionaries include fun as an adjective

and some don't. The younger you are, the more likely you are to think that there's nothing

wrong with a sentence that uses fun as an adjective, such as the sentence, quickly brought

fun games. In that sentence, fun is an adjective that modifies the noun games. You could say

squiggly brought fun games, squiggly brought boring games, or squiggly brought yellow

games, fun, boring and yellow are all adjectives. When I said words are fun, it was the grammatical

equivalent of saying words are boring, or words are yellow. Modern sources tend to grudgingly

accept fun as an adjective. For example, Garner's Modern American usage says fun as an adjective

has reached the stage where it, quote, becomes commonplace, even among many well-educated

people, but is still avoided and careful usage, unquote. Funnest, on the other hand, a word

that would be the standard inflected form of the adjective fun is less acceptable. I wrote

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