THERE’S NOTHING GRAMMATICALLY WRONG with that headline. Determiner, adjective, adjective, noun. So why is it so awkward to read?
Every native English speaker instinctively knows the correct order in which to place adjectives in a sentence. Let’s give it its correct formulation, and make it longer:
The big old red London bus.
Moving any of those adjectives to a different location results in a clumsiness that renders the sentence almost unintelligible:
The big red London old bus.
The old London big red bus.
The red London old big bus.
The surprising thing is that we’re never explicitly taught how to do this. If you ask anyone in what order adjectives should be placed, they’ll look at you blankly. And that’s because most people – myself included, until very recently – have never given it a moment’s thought.
The really surprising thing is that we almost never get it wrong. We don’t think about it, we just do it; and yet even the most poorly educated will happily pile adjective upon adjective without making a single error.
For the linguistic analysts among you, there is a rule, and it goes like this:
- Quantity or number
- Quality or opinion
- Size
- Age
- Shape
- Colour
- Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
- Purpose or qualifier
And here’s a sentence using all of them:
Three beautiful big old boxy red London double-decker buses all came at once.
But ask anyone to write down those rules, and they won’t even come close.
