I don’t know why, but I just thought of one of the weirdnesses of having been raised in one unique dialect area in the US and living a large part of my adult life in another very different one.
In English, the comparative and superlative forms of adjectives are formed by adding -er and -est to the adjective … usually. There are of course exceptions, as there are to every grammatical rule. In the area in which I was raised, the adjective “fun” is one of those exceptions.
In the area in which I’ve lived most of my adult life, it is not.
And one of the classic hallmarks of childish speech is when the kid will overapply a grammatical rule because they don’t yet recognize the exceptions. This causes 3 year olds to say things like “sleeped,” “mouses,” and “breaked” in addition to the far more annoying mispronunciations like “pitscher” and “piss-ghetti.” (Yes, I’d have been that parent if I’d had kids.)
And this still makes my ears skip a beat when I hear people with advanced technical degrees talk about something being “funner” than something else. To me, it sounds like someone with a PhD in cosmology who talks like a toddler. I’ll never get over that. I know it’s just my personal weirdness because of the peculiarities of the US dialect I was raised in versus the one I moved into, but my ears will trip over it for the rest of my life.
Anyone in southern California who chooses to stop saying “funner” and “funnest,” your sacrifice will not go unappreciated.
Anyone else who says things like “would of” or “could of,” or who tries to sound educated by stacking verb tenses on one another at random until they’re created some kind of insane jaegermeister-soaked auxiliary verb mosh pit — a.k.a. “had would have had been going to have had” — there’s just nothing you can do to get on my good side. If you ever need a kidney, a pint of blood, or even a cup of sugar, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I’m sure you would of had been going to have had been crushed by this realization.
Fire and Air 