Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

If Earth Looks Like a Blue Marble, Why Is Earth Day Associated with the Color Green? Also, 'Funnest.'

Episode Summary

872. The famous NASA "blue marble" image could have influenced people to make blue the color of environmentalism and Earth Day, but green won the day. In honor of the special day, we look at how the meaning of "green" has changed over time. Plus, we investigate the "fun" continuum and whether it's OK to use the words "funner" and "funnest."

Episode Notes

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References for the "funnest" segment

1. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1994, pp. 469-70.

2. Garner, B. Garner's Modern American Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 416.

3. The American Heritage Guide to Contemporary Usage and Style. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005, p. 197.

4. The Grammar Logs. #596, March 24, 2004, https://web.archive.org/web/20190427082852/http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/grammarlogs4/grammarlogs596.htm(accessed April 21, 2022).

5. Wallraff, B. Word Court. 87 (2000).

6. Garner, B. Garner's Modern American Usage. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 416.

Episode Transcription

Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today, in honor of Earth Day, we’ll investigate how the word “green” came to be associated with the environmental movement. It wasn’t a given! And then in the second segment, we'll talk about the funnest word of them all.

How Green Became Green

The original Earth Day Proclamation in 1970 refers to “our beautiful blue planet,” and the first Earth Day flag consisted of a NASA photo of the earth on a dark blue background. But the color of fields and forests prevailed, and today when we think of ecology and environmentalism, we think [of] green not blue.

The connection of the color green to growing things is found in nature, of course, and the word green has “associations with verdure, freshness, newness, health, and vitality [that are] are widespread among the Germanic languages,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. So in Old and early Middle English, we find forms of the word used to refer to the color of living vegetation, grass, and to grassy areas or leafy trees.

The meaning was extended to refer especially to tender or unripe vegetation and then more generally. The expression “green cheese,” for example, from the late fourteenth century, refers to cheese that still needed to be aged. The notion of green as unripe provided the basis for its later extension to people, so by the mid-sixteenth century, green could be used to refer to immaturity, rawness or inexperience.

In medieval and Renaissance literary symbology, green retained that sense of immaturity. Green became the color of young love as well, and sometimes of fickleness, and it was the color of both the sea and of fortune. Green was also associated with “greensickness,” referring to the jaundice of chlorosis, a type of anemia common in young women.

By William Shakespeare’s time, green had a variety of symbolic possibilities, and he used most of them in his plays. In “Love’s Labor’s Lost,” Don Armando’s page Moth jokes with his master, who is discoursing on famous loves:

Armando: O well-knit Sampson, strong-jointed Samson!…I am in love too. Who was Sampson’s love, my dear Moth?

Moth: A woman, master.

Armando: Of what complexion?

Moth: Of all the four, or the three, or the two, or one of the four.

Armando: Tell me precisely of what complexion.

Moth: Of the sea-water green, sir.

Armando: Is that one of the four complexions?

Moth: As I have read, sir, and the best of them, too.

Armando: Green indeed is the color of lovers; but to have a love of that color, methinks Sampson had small reason for it. He surely affected her for her wit.

Moth: It was so, sir, for she had a green wit. (I. ii. 72–89)

The four complexions mentioned are the four humors of Hippocrates and green refers to the phlegmatic type. The expression the “green wit” could indicate an immature wit or one that remains fresh, and Shakespeare is likely punning on the “green withs” or fresh vines with which Delilah bound Samson in the Biblical tale.

In other plays, Shakespeare used “green” to refer to youth (Cleopatra refers to “My salad days, when I was green in judgement”) or freshness (Claudius tells his court “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death, the memory be green”). When Lady MacBeth chides her husband for cowardice, she perhaps refers to the greensickness associated with young women:

“Was the hope drunke, Wherein you drest your selfe? Hath it slept since? And wakes it now to looke so greene, and pale, At what it did so freely?”

And of course, Shakespeare draws on an association of green with envy and jealousy, in expressions like “green-eyed jealousy” and “the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

For writers like Shakespeare, the color green was full of potential, but it shows up in popular neology (word coining) as well. In the nineteenth century, we find expressions like “greenhorn” with a first OED citation of 1824, referring initially to immature cattle [and] then to inexperienced soldiers. The Civil War brought “greenbacks” for the paper money backed by government credit. In the early nineteenth century, red and green signals were used on railways for nighttime visibility, leading to the association of green and go.

The early twentieth century saw the gardening expression “green thumb,” from 1937, and by the 1960s the term “green revolution” was being used to refer to the transformation of agricultural practices for increased food production. From 1979 on, “green” refers to environmentalism broadly, though sometimes writers would signal that they were using the word in a novel way by placing it in scare quotes.

The OED noted these new compounds over the last forty years: green fuel (1979), green-minded (1984), green-economy (1986), green marketing (1988), green consumerism (1988), green electricity (1989), green chemistry (1989), green audits (1989), and green burial (1991). The association of green with ecology is here to stay.

And to think, it might have all been blue. Happy Earth Day.

That segment was written by Edwin Battistella, who teaches linguistics and writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland, where he has served as a dean and as interim provost. He is the author of "Dangerous Crooked Scoundrels," "Do You Make These Mistakes in English?" "Bad Language" and "The Logic of Markedness." It originally appeared on the OUP blog and appears here with permission.

Researching the word “funnest” and its close relation “funner” turned out to be a lot less fun than I had hoped — or at least more complicated.

First, the easy part. Everyone agrees that “fun” was originally just a noun. For example, you could say, “We had fun,” which is the grammatical equivalent of “We had cake.” Fun is more of a concept whereas cake is more of a thing, but they're both nouns. “Cake” may jump out at you more as one of those people-places-and-things concrete nouns we’ve talked about before, but “fun” is also a noun. It’s an abstract noun.

‘Fun,’ the Adjective

But now we head down the slippery slope of fun because many modern sources grudgingly (2) accept that “fun” can also be used as an adjective, as in “Squiggly throws a fun party.” (1, 3) In that sentence, “fun” is an adjective that modifies the noun “party.” It was a fun party.

How "fun" made its way from a noun to an adjective is a great illustration of how language can change over time. Nouns can be used to modify other nouns, and when they are they're called attributive nouns. In the phrase "sugar cookie," "sugar" is a noun, but it's being used in an attributive way to describe the cookie. Attributive nouns do the same thing as adjectives. You could say, "I ate a sugar cookie," or "I ate a yummy cookie." The sentences are constructed the same way, but "sugar" is an attributive noun and "yummy" is an adjective.

The Oxford English Dictionary notes a few uses of "fun" as an attributive noun such as "fun fair" and "fun-fest" in the early 1900s. It was probably from there that "fun" worked its way from noun to adjective. In English, nouns often end up becoming adjectives too. (1, 2)

A few sources note that using "fun" as an adjective is a generational thing. It's much more acceptable to children, (3) youngsters, (4) slackers, (5) and people who were born after 1970. (6) A Google Ngram search, which shows how often words are used in the books Google has scanned, shows that writers started using “fun” as an adjective more often around 1960, and using it that way has been steadily increasing ever since.

In fact, I suspect many of you listening probably use “fun” as an adjective without even thinking about it, and it doesn't sound strange to your ears, but remember, that wasn't always the case. It's a concession on the part of language traditionalists to not freak out when you say something such as "It was a fun party." They'd prefer you say something like “We had fun at the party.”

Next, if you accept “fun,” do you have to accept “funner” and “funnest”?

And here's where it gets really contentious. This is where I got stuck looking up reference after reference trying to find a convincing answer. If people accept that “fun” is an adjective, they should accept that “fun” can be inflected like other adjectives. If “wild” becomes “wilder” and “wildest,” and “silly” becomes “sillier” and “silliest,” why can't “fun” become “funner” and “funnest”?

In the episode on comparatives and superlatives, we told you that "one-syllable adjectives use the suffixes ‘-er’ or ‘-est’ on the end of the adjective. For example, ‘tall’ has one syllable, so, if you wanted to compare the height of your family members, you might say, ‘I am taller than my sister, but I’m not the tallest in the family.’” If you accept that "fun" is an adjective, the way to compare the funness of two or three things would be to use the words "funner" and "funnest."

Yet, even people who do accept that "fun" is an adjective are unlikely to embrace "funner" and "funnest." It seems as if language mavens haven't truly gotten over their irritation that “fun” has become an adjective, and they've decided to dig in their heels against “funner” and “funnest.” In their minds, if “fun” as an adjective is still somewhat informal, then the inflected forms are still “nonstandard,” or to use less fussy words—“funnest” is grating and horrifying. And the language mavens still have enough influence to hold the line for now.

However, it’s probably a losing battle. Again a Google Ngram search shows a big and ongoing increase in the use of “funner” and “funnest” in books starting around 1980.

The Final Analysis

In the end, I've come to believe that there is a “fun” continuum. On one end you have "fun," the noun, and everyone is happy to cluster around and be associated with it. That's the standard usage.

Then, if you move on to "fun," the adjective, you've got a smaller but still very significant group of people who will give their approval.

And then as you move on down the continuum, you've got a much smaller group of people who are willing to grab "funner" and "funnest" by the shoulders and give them a big welcoming hug. That would be an example of language in flux. (For more examples, see my TedX talk about language change). If you remember an Apple marketing campaign from way back in 2008, you’ll remember that Steve Jobs was part of this group. He thrust "funnest" into the spotlight when he predicted Apple’s new iPod would be the "funnest iPod ever.” And maybe it was, but technology is fickle and language change is constant. iPods aren’t very common anymore, but the popularity of “funnest” keeps growing.

Finally I have a follow-up story about chicken milk from my friend Aven of the Endless Knot podcast.

Hi, Mignon. It’s Aven from the Endless Knot podcast with a follow up to last week’s familect. I had to laugh when I heard your caller say their family called chocolate milk ‘chicken milk’ because our family uses the words ‘chicken milk’ too, but not for chocolate milk but for eggnog.

And that’s because up here in Canada, all our food and other stuff has French and English on the packaging and in French, eggnog is called ‘lait de poule’

I don’t know if that’s only in Quebec or if it’s the France French for it as well. I’ve never checked.

But of course the literal translation of ‘lait de poule’ is milk of chicken. So in our family, and I’m pretty sure other people in Canada do this too, we commonly refer to eggnog as ‘chicken milk.’ So that’s I guess not just a familect but maybe a local dialect.

Anyway, love your show. Had to share that with you. Thanks. Bye.

Thanks, Aven.

I did a quick search, and I believe eggnog is called the same thing in France, and I’ve been thinking about eggnog ever since your call. I made some from a recipe instead of buying it pre-made last year for the holidays, and it was incredible. Maybe it could be a twice-a-year thing.

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