The most amazing grammar rule of all
The most amazing grammar rule of all
By Tony Spencer-Smith
The red, long, Australian, lovely flower, the grevillea, is quite extraordinary.
Eh? I’m trying to do justice to the beauty of one of the country’s most striking flowers, but something is wrong.
All of us are pretty good at grammar. We learn most grammar rules automatically at our mother’s knee, without even thinking about them or being able to give them a name.
The abilities of our brains to decipher the rules of whatever language we happen to have been born into is amazing. And one of the most amazing English rules of all, because it is so complex yet most of us obey it unthinkingly without ever having heard of it, is the order in which adjectives should be used.
If English were our first language and we repeatedly said things such as “me wants a cup of tea” or “the car went more and more fast”, someone might commit us to a place for the grammatically challenged, where we could fritter away our lives uttering bad sentences.
That’s because something would have impaired our natural grammar ability.
Let’s look at my confusing description of the grevillea. Why does it look so messy? Because I have breached that inbuilt order. Let me try again: the lovely, long, red, Australian flower, the grevillea. Ah, much better. Now they are in the correct order.
Here’s how it works: lovely is about your opinion of the flower, so it needs to come first. Long comes next because it is about the size. Red then follows because it refers to colour. And finally comes Australian, the origin of the flower.
Confused? And yet you would probably have got the order right automatically in the first place. So somehow, you have internalised this obscure rule.
Here’s how the Cambridge Dictionary describes the order:
- Opinion (unusual, lovely, beautiful)
- Size (big, small, tall)
- Physical quality (thin, rough, untidy)
- Shape (round, square, rectangular)
- Age (young, old, youthful)
- Colour (blue, red, pink)
- Origin (Dutch, Japanese, Turkish)
- Material (metal, wood, plastic)
- Type (general-purpose, four-sided)
- Purpose (cleaning, hammering, cooking).
Of course, as with many aspects of English, there is some wriggle-room. As the Cambridge Dictionary subtly phrases it, this sequence is “the most usual”, provided “we don’t want to emphasise any one of the adjectives.”
Mark Forsyth caused quite a stir a few years ago when he wrote about adjectival order in his book The Elements of Eloquence, the first time many had heard of this rule. He gave a slightly different list that omits physical quality and type and reverses the order of shape and age. But still the lists are very similar.
Forsyth writes ominously that if you don’t get the sequence right, “you’ll sound like a maniac”.
He tells the cautionary tale of J.R.R. Tolkien who, when he was seven, long before he penned The Lord of the Rings, wrote his first story, about a “green great dragon”.
Writes Forsyth: “He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely could not have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.”
Here are a few more mangled sequences to untangle:
- The steel, Argentinian, old, ugly axe.
- A grey, young, African, delightful elephant.
- Three tennis, yellow, fuzzy balls.
Tony Spencer-Smith is an award-winning novelist, a former Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest Magazine and an experienced corporate writer and writing trainer. His book The Essentials of Great Writing was published in Sydney in 2009.