Grammar Girl here. I was looking at the Apple website today and I noticed they're doing

some interesting things with language again. The company that brought us the Think Different

campaign and the Funnest iPod ever is added again, plugging the Funnest of the new iPod

and how they've re-nannowed the new iPod nano.

First let's talk about fun. Back in 2008 when Steve Jobs announced that Apple had made

the Funnest iPod ever, I talked about how everyone accepts fun as a noun but some people

don't accept fun as an adjective. Nobody objects to a sentence such as we had fun, in which

fun is a noun. It's just like saying we had cookies or we had cake. But some people

object to fun in sentences like today was a fun day where fun is being used as an adjective

like happy or sad. You could say today was a happy day or today was a sad day or today

was a fun day. And in those cases happy, sad and fun are all modifying the word day.

An interesting point that I didn't mention before is that nouns can act like adjectives

without actually being adjectives. And when they do we call them attributive nouns. For

example when you look up the words tree or hat in the Merriam Webster online dictionary,

it doesn't say anything about the words being adjectives. But in sentences such as

we went to a tree farm and get my hat box, tree and hat are attributive nouns acting like

adjectives. Tree is modifying farm and hat is modifying box. My frequent guest writer

Neil Whitman just mentioned to me in passing a couple of days ago that it was through

this kind of attributive noun use that fun slipped from being a noun to an adjective

because that's the kind of thing nerds like us chat about. Also, the Oxford English

dictionary entry for fun as a noun shows that fun can be used in these kind of compounds

such as fun fast, fun fair and fun run. So that's how we got from fun as a noun to fun

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