Turns out there is a list describing the ordering of adjectives. Why must english be so much work?
Now, although I, and probably many others, was unaware of the rules for ordering adjectives, the _concept_ of correct (or at least better) ordering is not alien, as I described at the start. When it's your native language, you pick so much up from context it can be surprising the general rules you seemingly intuitively know, without having a formalised basis.
Because of course schools do not, for better or worse, spend much time at all these days teaching english grammar.
Languages are dynamic things. The structure and words and conjugations that we enjoy today are not the same as those of a couple of hundred years ago, let alone of five hundred years ago. Shakespearean english, for all that high school students curse it, is not Old English or even Middle English. It's Early Modern English, and represented a time when the language became more standardised.
And yet english is characterised by a mishmash of rules and exceptions, regularities and irregularities. When Shakespeare coined the word "arouse", rather than the existing "rouse" or first used "to numb" as a transitive verb, he directly shaped the language.
Where lies the line between error and creation? Between breaking and shaping? And what role has creativity?
http://www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm
When one thinks of modern attempts at reshaping the english language, the primary example that comes to mind is that in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the Orwell novel, words are both added to the language and removed. Thoughtcrime and the Thought Police are some of the more enduring ones that have spread outside the novel.
But one of the things that stood out for me, perhaps because of a programming mindset, was the regularity that was introduced. Good and ungood. Good and plusgood and doubleplusgood. In a language that seems unnecessarily complex, the construction of new, yet readily understood words seems like positive growth.
Which leads back to the list for determining the order of adjectives.
Does having a specific set of rules for determining adjective order improve the language, or is it arbitrary and capricious?
Does adhering to the order prescribed in the list aid in regularity, or constrain forms gratuitously?
Having dabbled in poetry and French - and perhaps having something of a rebellious streak in me - I'm not averse to placing adjectives after nouns, or striking out for more whimsical phrasing. Whether I deliberately start pushing at the walls this list throws up - well, I don't yet know.
But there's a related area that I think offers some intriguing possibilities, and that's the case where an adjective should only follow a linking verb, and where an adjective must precede a noun.
For the first case, the British Council give the example of:
"Our teacher was ill" - good.
"We had an ill teacher" - bad.
Though of course, if you have two teachers standing up against the wall, one of whom is ill and one of whom is in good health, I don't think it would be improper to remark that:
"The ill teacher collapsed."
Though the implication is that a more proper description would be:
"The teacher that was ill collapsed."
Though perhaps I'm over-stretching their wording of "normally used".
On the other hand, their other example is worded as describing adjectives that "are used only in front of a noun" - which is quite firm.
And either I don't agree with their strict ruling, or I just don't see it for their specific examples, one of which is:
"There were countless problems with the new machinery." - good.
"The problems with the new machinery were countless." - bad.
One explanation for my finding the second sentence to be acceptable is that I'm Australian, and therefore the rules and formations are slightly different. It was remarked upon by a friend from the US that he found the dangling word "heaps" to be odd and unusual. For him, he expected it to be in front of the item it described - "heaps of sugar" - and not left lying unreferenced at the end of a sentence as in "I took heaps." And so the issue of english dialects is also something to take into consideration for acceptable phrasing.
And finally, the ordered list itself.
Adjective Ordering:
- General opinion (good, important)
- Specific opinion (tasty, smelly)
- Size (large, small)
- Shape (square, circular)
- Age (young, old)
- Colour (blue, black)
- Nationality (French, Irish)
- Material (brick, wood)
- Qualifier (rocking [chair], book [cover])
From: http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/english-grammar/adjectives/order-adjectives
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Adjective_order
