Great Green Dragons, not Green Great Dragons
Great Green Dragons
English is weird.
So all of you already knew that. But trust me, when you’re a writer, it gets even weirder. You start obsessing on obscure rules and punctuation, all in the effort to communicate with a reader.
For example, if I were to write ‘The green great gargantuan dragon thundered down the street,’ it probably gives you goosebumps for all the wrong reasons. Some of you are already twitching and itching to put in the comments something like : Don’t you know it’s the great gargantuan green dragon?
And you would not be wrong to say such a thing. The more interesting issue is why?
Why indeed to we care that we see a red rubber ball, not a rubber red ball. I know it sounds wrong, but why does that matter?
The answer is known as the Royal Order of Adjectives. Something that every native speaker knows and probably not a single one of us have actually been taught.
This oft unspoken rule tells us that multiple descriptors go in a specific order:
- Opinion
- Size
- Age
- Shape
- Color
- Origin
- Material
- Purpose
If a writer violates that order, it feels like an itchy wool sweater on your ears. And you kind of hate the writer.
So you would think that means a writer should make sure never to violate that rule, right? Well, not exactly.
What if you want a character to sound particularly uncomfortable to a reader? How better to show and not tell the reader this character is not a normal sort of fellow?
Sneaky huh?
And that my friends is why being a writer definitely makes you weird.
Having read all the books in this series and can’t wait for the next one I thoroughly enjoyed reading this post and went fishing for the subsequent ones.
Regards and best wishes
Anne (South Africa)
Not a normal sort of fellow, or a particular characterization for a non-English speaker. That’s what they used to make Yoda’s speech distinctive; change the sentence structure to verb-following instead of verb-preceding. It was the audible hallmark of his other-ness. You could use a typical word order error to imply a connection between two otherwise seemingly un-related characters.
Yes, English is weird – but it’s also grand. In many languages, the errors that can be hints in English just make a sentence un-readable.
I’m definitely happy to be English as I would hate to have to try and learn it! I had enough problems with German at school with all the different words for ‘the’ and ‘a’. I much preferred my Spanish lessons and even found Latin easier.
Makes me think of this, which I always enjoy reading:
https://dararochlinbookdoctor.com/2018/08/24/unwritten-rules-of-english-grammar-tock-tick-dong-ding-kong-king/
Fun, this was. LOL! Ode to Yoda. Catherine’s comment made me laugh. I was such a fan of Yoda in those early movies. Thanks for the lesson. Blessings, stay safe, and healthy.
I am german, so I don’t get all of the linguistic subtleties. However, I think the german language has almost the same order in adjectives. I have never thought of it until now, but the order is very similar in German. Do you think it is because the european languages are related?