I am fascinated by the way in which usage has the power to change language. Now I am old it is very noticeable how the English language has changed since my childhood. France has an institute whose only purpose is to preserve the French language as if it can be held in time and is something pure and sacred. In reality it inevitably doesn’t work and Le weekend is widely used by the French.
Britain has no such institution and is open and accepting as the language morphs in myriad directions. However, there are many occasions when usage grates on the ear. My annoyance for today is the word ‘fun.’ Fun is an abstract noun but it can be used as an adjective in which case it would be termed an adjectival noun or a noun modifier. It is now commonly heard for people to say something was ‘very fun’ or ‘so fun.’ This makes no sense to me at all and simply sounds wrong. What might go in front of fun I hear you ask. Well: ‘great fun’, ‘such fun’, ‘a lot of fun’ would have been used in the 50s and 60s and probably on till the end of the century. I have certainly written about ‘enormous fun’ or ‘huge fun’ and maybe listeners or readers felt uncomfortable with that. Grammatically, the words ‘very’ and ‘so’ are just incorrect when preceding fun, but I suspect that will be totally irrelevant and usage will carry the day. At present it seems to be termed casual usage rather then formal but I begin to suspect that this is no longer remarked upon in schools and for all I know universities.
I can accept all this, with interest, but I can’t believe I will begin to use it myself.