• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, May 10, 2015

"That was so fun." Sounds like a perfectly proper phrase, right? How about "Every day should be as fun as a Phillies game"? Sounds fine, right? Nope. That particular phrase, used in a Philadelphia Phillies TV promo, caught the attention of Bucks County Columnist Jerry Jonas who wrote: "The words jumped off the TV screen and mentally knocked me for a loop."

Why? Because, as Jonas explains, "The sentence contains a blatantly ungrammatical misuse of the word 'fun,' and even worse, the way the sentence was structured made no sense whatsoever."

Over the course of years, the English language and its usage continues to experience great change. Some of that change is acceptable. Most is not. As Jonas explains, "fun" is a noun and "as" is an adverb and adverbs never modify nouns. So what's the correct form for this particular phrase?

Jonas says the correct usage of the word "fun" should be, "Every day should be as much fun as a Phillies game. The word "fun" in this case is now correctly modified by the preposition, "much."

But Jonas doesn't stop there and slaps the copywriter upside the head once more saying the truly proper expression should read, “Every day should have as much fun as a Phillies game." The word "have" rather than "be." 

While this sort of nitpicking could be written off as the pointless babblings of a nettlesome perfectionist, it's quite clear much of the English language we see in many forms of advertising is, shall we say, less than fully correct. Perhaps the most famous misuse of the English language is illustrated by Apple's famed "Think Different" campaign which, properly, should have read, "Think Differently." Of course, the debate on that one has raged on for years .