Funny peculiar

A couple of weeks ago, Arancha asked a good question: "In my essay, you put down to have more fun. Why not funny?"

Good question. The technical answer is that "fun" is the noun form: We had a lot of fun at Alberto's party.

"Funny" is an adjective, but be careful. It's not automatically the adjective version of "fun": As the British say, there's funny ha-ha and funny peculiar.

"Funny ha-ha" is the definition that most people know - something that's amusing and makes you laugh: I have a really funny joke to tell you!

BUT - and this is a big but - in spoken English, it means "strange, not quite right" or "suspicious:"

- Something funny happened to me the other day....a pumpkin fell on my head.
- It's funny how things never work out how you expect them to.
- He gave me a funny look when I asked him about his mother.
- The accountant wondered if his client was doing something funny with his money.

In these cases, "funny" has nothing to do with humour. It's closer to the idea of deception or tricks.

And THAT is THAT!

Arancha sent me a great question last night:

Cual de las siguiente frases es la correcta en inglés:
1ª/ I THINK THAT TO BUY IN THE SUPERMARKET........
2ª/ I THINK THAT BUYING IN THE SUPERMARKET.........
3ª/ I THINK THAT BUY IN THE SUPERMARKET.........

Do you know the answer? It's #2, and here's the reason why.

If you look at the way the verbs are organized, you would probably have a sentence like this:

PART ONE: >>I think that<<
PART TWO: >>buying beer in the supermarket is less expensive than buying beer in the corner store.<<

The sentence has TWO verbs -- THINK and IS. Both of them have different subjects: I think and buying in the supermarket is. What happens is that the information that comes after "that" has to be a noun - you always think of something that needs a verb, and that verb always needs another subject. Here are some more examples:

I think that McDonald's is delicious. (Me: "I think that McDonald's is delicious!")
He thinks that his mother is going crazy. (Jim: "I think that my mother is going crazy.")
We think that we will probably go to France this summer. (Alberto and I: "We will probably go to France this summer.")
They think that Barcelona is a very expensive city. (Jon and Ann: "Barcelona is a very expensive city!")

Why? In all of the examples, "I think that" almost works like reported speech (estilo indirecto):

º I think that McDonald's is delicious.
º He told his mother that McDonald's is delicious.
º The advertisements say that McDonald's is delicious.
º It has been reported in EL PAÍS that McDonald's is delicious.

In Spanish, you would need the infinitive, but in English, we treat it like a noun idea, so we use the gerund form of the verb (since it's usually the easiest noun form.)

This is one really excellent reason why an English-only dictionary is a much better idea than a translating dictionary: most of them will tell you when you use words like THAT to connect secondary ideas with verbs like say, think, know, expect, tell and explain.