I had pretty much given up on this blog, but a friend told me that he still checked for updates faithfully, so I decided to give it another go.
There’s no need to write too much about our recent adventures, there will be time for that. Today’s post is dedicated to a fairly normal word, funny. I’ve never thought of funny as a funny word. I mean, weird is a weird word because it breaks the i before e rule, but funny? It’s just normal. It’s pronounced like it’s written, and I doubt it has ever been misspelled. There’s just nothing abnormal about the word.
We’ll come back to the word funny in a bit…
As we’ve mentioned, Swedes have nearly mastered the nearly language. They are proud of it, and as a long-term tourist, I’m quite thankful for the fact that they won’t hesitate to speak English with me when I need a crutch. Ask any of our many tourists and they’ll all tell you how wonderful it is being able to speak their native language with a Swede…it makes everything (except learning Swedish) infinitely easier.
So back to the word funny, there are two words that a native English speaker has never confused that I have heard misused on multiple occasions: fun and funny.
You can imagine my surprise when I was chatting with a coworker who was looking to move from a data crunching position into more of a client-facing position and he said, “You know, I really want to get out and meet clients. That’s the funny part of the business.” I had never heard a Swede make such a blatant mistake and not catch it. He then went on to stress his point by repeating how “funny” it was to consult and sell to clients. I was at a loss…this guy knows English perfectly. Do I, the guy who will never be as proficient in his language as he is in my language, correct him, or just let him run with his mistake?
This conversation took place after a year of living in Sweden, so I thought it must be an isolated incident, but no, I have heard the mistake made a large number of times since then. How can an entire country of near-perfect English speakers have a problem getting two such normal words straight?
In the end, I blame ABBA. I was going to blame the song writer, but the entire group performed the lines “Money, Money, Money / Must be funny / In a rich man’s world”, so I guess they should all get equal blame. I know, it could be funny to live in a rich man’s world, but I really don’t think that’s what they meant when writing the lyrics, so I’ll squash that rebuttal before I continue. Obviously they were referring to how much fun it would be to live in a rich man’s world. If they really needed a rhyme for the word money, couldn’t they have used the word funny in a way that made sense?
To be fair, Swedes know that ABBA’s lyrics aren’t anything to brag about, but considering the fact that every Swede born after the disco era has grown up listening to ABBA, you’d think parliament would pass a law requiring the nation’s English curriculums to dedicate a day to explaining this blatant misuse of the word funny.
That’s my rant, and my explanation for why I think funny is a funny word.
2 comments:
for the record: I still check-in on your blog. Also, I think a lot of non-English English speakers get fun and funny mixed up. I think it's kind of like when little kids get I and me confused. In a way, it's a tense to "fun" kind of confusing. I feel that it's a minor speaking error, which most people would be happy to overlook. Hope all is well!
It wouldn't surprise me to have heard any other non-native English speaker make this mistake, but the mistakes were made by people who speak English so well that I often forget that they're not even speaking their first language. I know that in their shoes I would want to be corrected, which is the main reason I didn't know what to do.
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