In a recent post, I talked about mondegreens and silly lyrics in pop music. Last night while watching Mama Mia, I came across another pop song that serves as a fabulous teaching tool because it illustrates a very common error for ESL students.

ABBA's "Money, Money, Money" has the lines:

Money, Money, Money
Must be funny
In a rich man's world

I think they mean that it must be fun in a rich man's world. It's a common mistake to assume that fun is the adjective form of fun. There's also the problem that fun doesn't translate well in a lot of languages - It says something about the Russians that there really is no word for fun in Russian.

So fun is an adjective that describes something that you do for the sake of doing it, because it makes you happy, because it is entertaining. Funny describes something that makes you laugh, something humorous or amusing (In other contexts it can also mean something strange or unusual).

So I think ABBA meant to say that it must be fun, not funny. Unless she means that rich people can hire Jim Carrey or Stephen Wright to tell them jokes all day.


The video of "Money, Money, Money", in case you care: