Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/24/there-is-a-royal-order-of-adjectives-and-you-follow-it-without-knowing-what-it-is.html
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What a great big silly rule.
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I’m using the royal order of adjectives right now.
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The adjective applied to the order of adjectives seems like a weird descriptor to apply. Why not a civil order of adjectives? What’s royal about it?
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Well, I’m suddenly thinking that strictly following it could be a royal pain in the ass.
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It’s an outdated and useless way to control things. You know, royal.
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I think the point is that we all do it entirely subconsciously. Really, almost nobody ‘knows’ the rules in a way that enables us to describe them like this, but we all ‘know’ them and implement them automatically. It becomes ingrained as we learn the language, and not following them is actually quite hard - hard enough to itself be a pain in the ass.
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I did read and understand the post. My comment was just a joke. That kind of thing does happen here from time to time, don’tcha know.
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Ah, OSPQSACOMTP.
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Seize control of the means of adjective order!
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This topic comes up every once in a while in any forum (strange, but true). And it always reminds me of this hearbreaking poem by Alexandra Teague
adjectives of order :: Alexandra Teague
That summer, she had a student who was obsessed
with the order of adjectives. A soldier in the South
Vietnamese army, he had been taken prisoner when
Saigon fell. He wanted to know why the order
could not be altered. The sweltering city streets shook
with rockets and helicopters. The city sweltering
streets. On the dusty brown field of the chalkboard,
she wrote: The mother took warm homemade bread
from the oven. City is essential to streets as homemade
is essential to bread. He copied this down, but
he wanted to know if his brothers were lost before
older, if he worked security at a twenty-story modern
downtown bank or downtown twenty-story modern.
When he first arrived, he did not know enough English
to order a sandwich. He asked her to explain each part
of Lovely big rectangular old red English Catholic
leather Bible. Evaluation before size. Age before color.
Nationality before religion. Time before length. Adding
and, one could determine if two adjectives were equal.
After Saigon fell, he had survived nine long years
of torture. Nine and long. He knew no other way to say this.
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“Royal Order of Adjectives” sounds like some kind of 19th-century honor - “I hereby appoint you to the Royal Order of Adjectives; here is your ribbon to represent this signal honor”.
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Than you for the powerful lines, and welcome to BoingBoing!
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Doesn’t the big bad wolf go against this order?
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Is “bad” an opinion or a quality?
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Good question!
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It does but “The big bad wolf” is a distinct character in the story. If there had been multiple wolves perhaps the order would have mattered more.
Earlier today I saw a Small Downy Woodpecker. In the summer I sometimes see Great Crested Flycatchers.
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It’s mildly amusing, as “royal order” is a collocation. A slight pun to brighten the day.
Attributed to Charles Darling. who wrote this book.
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It’s funny how this order exists, as no-one’s ever taught the whole sequence, just parts of it.
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Grammar is an attempt to flesh out the unconscious impulses of native speakers.
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