Meaningful Returns

“The English language is a rascal.”

I came across a post over at Kottke today that blew my mind in a way that was at once disturbing and fantastic. The whole point of the post was to show that there is a very specific order for adjectives when we string more than one of them together in front of a noun. Here, read this excerpt from the book The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth:

…adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So 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. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

This is not something that is expressly taught in any school that I am aware of, and while I have been speaking English for the overwhelming majority of my life (admittedly with varying degrees of success), I have never even once thought about the order of the adjectives that I include in front of a noun.

And yet, it still pretty much happens without a hitch most of the time, and that is nothing short of incredible. The subtleties that our brains pick up on over time…just astounding.

But also, something to be very careful about. Because if we can pick up on adjective word order without meaning to, what else are we picking up without meaning to?

I used to live on the 13th richest (slash most expensive) street in Raleigh, and I bet close to half the homes had a Land Rover in the driveway. Why is that? Was there an HOA meeting where a Land Rover salesman pitched everyone on the virtues of British SUVs? Of course not. People were following rules no one taught them.

If you walked into a middle-school gym during boys’ basketball practice, you would see that the overwhelming majority of the feet in the gym would be situated nicely into a pair of Nike or Under Armor basketball shoes. Why is that?

In many American homes, the first thing that happens when people start arriving home from school and work is the turning on of the television. Why is that?

I guess the way to keep this dynamic from doing us too much harm is to be willing to ask difficult questions of ourselves on a regular basis, to accept that we may be doing things for reasons we are altogether unaware of, to be courageous enough to make change where it’s due.