Which of these two sentences 'feels' wrong?
The brown big dog.
The big brown dog.
It's the first one, right?
That's because, whether or not we're aware of it, we've been brought up to expect adjectives to go in this order:
Opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose NOUN.
It's why we write the 'big old empty house' rather than the 'empty old big house'.
Or 'the new red woollen jumper' rather than the 'woollen new red jumper'.
How did I discover this? Because a paragraph from Mark Forsyth's book The Elements of Eloquence went viral a little while ago on social media.
There are many of these kinds of rules which is why, as I was told by a friend who has English as a second language, 'It's an easy language to learn to speak but an absolute nightmare to learn to write'.
If you want to know more, read Mark's book.
There's a feature on it here on the BBC Culture website.
Counterexample: the Big Bad Wolf.
ReplyDeleteEnglish is such a hodge-podge of languages that there are akways exceptions to every rule - if, indeed, you can even call this a rule. 'Big Bad Wolf' is actually mentioned in the BBC feature that I included a link to. As a phrase it folows the stronger 'rule' of ablaut reduplication - the pattern by which vowels change in a repeated word to form a new word or phrase with a specific meaning, like wishy-washy or crisscross. The vowel sounds in these words move from the front to the back of your mouth: say 'bit bet bat bought but' out loud and pay attention to where in your mouth you’re making the vowel sound to find out how this works. This rule is why clocks go ticktock instead of tocktick and doorbells go ding-dong instead of dong-ding and why we have product names like KitKat or TikTok. :D
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