#nosascomp

[kassidy-writes-blog]

NOSASCOMP: Why Green, Great Dragons Cannot Exist

In September of 2016, Matthew Anderson of BBC tweeted a photo that soon went viral of an excerpt from the book "The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase" by Mark Forsyth. The excerpt contained information vital to the English language. So I’m here to tell you, in more detail, the order in which adjectives must be placed and why exactly green, great dragons cannot exist.

Adjective Order (descending from easy to change to more difficult to change)

Number* — five, several, many, hundreds

Opinion — lovely, beautiful, useless, fantastic

Size — big, tiny, large, great, minuscule

Age — mature, ancient, young

Shape — square, oval, round

Color — red, blue, yellow

Origin — American, English, Italian, German

Material — wooden, cotton, silk, plastic

Purpose — typing, whittling, grooming

Any of these adjective types can be used in succession as many times as you’d like! You can use one, two, three, or all of them, but they must keep their order! So, to quote Forsyth, “You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac... And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”

What is your opinion on adjective order? Is it a must, or can the rules be bent? 

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*The number category is not mentioned in Forsyth’s book. Like the other adjectives, it is optional. It would take the place of the article ‘a’ before the list of adjectives.