PurpleCar

Hold on to your hats, word snobs: you won’t be invited to the funnest parties if you keep correcting people on their use of “funner” and “funnest.” These words are acceptable forms of the adjective “fun” and you need to step off your high horse if you want to be funner to be around.

From Merriam-Webster’s recent newsletter:

Q. I have your 1991 dictionary and it shows that funner and funnest are listed as adjectives. Friends are arguing with me, saying funner is not a word, and there seems to be no definite answer that I can find while searching online. What’s the real story?

A. The superlatives funner and funnest are indeed both words, as your dictionary asserts. In the entry in that book, the words are preceded by the label sometimes to show that they are somewhat uncommon forms. Both words are found in casual speech, and are even occasionally used by writers in such publications as The Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, and the Boston Globe.

The reason for the lack of universal acceptance of funner and funnest has to do with the history of the word fun. Formerly only a noun, fun existed 100 years before the adjective sense developed. Noun uses like “have fun” and “do something for fun” were considered proper, while uses like “a fun game” and “it’s fun to do” were not used. While this changed over time, some people still do not consider fun an adjective, saying that it’s only being used attributively when it’s before a noun, as in “a fun game.” (Nouns are often used attributively before other nouns, such as school in school bus.) The fact that one thing can be described as “more fun” than another, though, is persuasive evidence for the adjective fun, and justification for the development of funner and funnest. Most writers and speakers avoid the superlatives because they sound a little odd because they are encountered more rarely. But the forms are nonetheless real and not slang.

So there.

Regular readers of this blog know I love neologisms, which is just a fancy word for “made-up words.” If you’re a word nerd like me, follow Schott’s Vocab from Ben Schott at the New York Times. During the week, Mr. Schott reports on neologisms he comes across in his travels, and on weekends he hosts a “contest” for readers to come up with new definitions. When I catch the contest, I love to add my 2 cents. Mr. Schott publishes highlighted answers in a post during the week. You should try it, it’s a ton of fun. Some people take the challenges so seriously, some go for snark. Guess which one approach I take.

This past weekend’s challenge was “Define ‘Family.'” Mr. Schott took my definition for the title of this week’s post. Go take a look:

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/people-you-dont-want-to-friend-on-facebook/

http://twitter.com/purplecar

I read an interesting CNN article today (yes, I know. Shocker. CNN is mostly trash). It talks about a small, (very non-scientific) experiment that the authors conducted on Twitter, using Alyssa Milano, Bill O’Reilly and another not famous person. The authors wanted to see if a tweet from a person with a million followers would increase sales of their book.

As I said, the scientific method in this experiment is non-existent. But their observations ring quite true to me, based on what I know of behavior from years of reading university research articles and books on behavior. The article actually backs up what I told WHYY in Philadelphia as an advisory board member to their new Newsworks project: Go after the smaller big wigs on Twitter. The people with 100 followers have way more influence with those 100 followers than I have with any 100 of my 5,800 followers. If the Newsworks team can engage the hyperlocal chatters and solidify them as believers/community members, then the Newsworks word will spread.

http://twitter.com/cecilyk

My other “high-follow” friends on Twitter and Facebook have reported the same observation, that their influence seems to change once they get over say, 5,000 followers. They get less replies, less conversation, more spam, etc. Unless, like the CNN article suggests, there is something at stake. My friend Cecily Kellogg (@CecilyK) felt the impact of her influence online lately when she tweeted about the pedophile book that was up on Amazon (that Amazon at first refused to take down). Her tweet spread like wildfire because there was a very important debate behind it. Then Cecily received lots and lots of internet hate from personalities whom I call FAFWs: First Amendment Flag Wavers, probably because they (mistakenly) saw Cecily as the origin of the tweet and the debate. So, in this case, Cecily’s influence went far, but if she only had 100 followers, she wouldn’t have been attacked by the FAFWs. Those kind of myopic posers see Cecily’s follower count (around 37,200 at this writing), and see her as one of those kind of authorities one may attack.

http://twitter.com/brogan

At around 5000 followers, I get only small versions of that kind of hate. But flaming someone online is easy, and it is an accepted, even expected behavior. Buying something or spending actual money is a behavior that takes a few steps and involves financial standing. As any marketer knows, that’s a much different thing. Put an actual cash price on each flame comment and you’ll see the comments disappear. We all know how that works.

Anyway, check out the article and tell me how you experience twitter, influence, and what it really takes to influence people to buy your product.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/11/16/fowler.christakis.tweeting/index.html?hpt=C2#

Here’s a short video (about 2 minutes) I made for you that pokes a little fun at the whole world of social media consulting.