My posts about the craft of writing tend to be about
the “big” stuff – character development, scene structure, setting, and plot.
(Lots and lots of plot!) But sometimes I worry about smaller things – the
actual words. What they look like. Where they fit in a sentence or a paragraph.
Even what their proper order is in a phrase.
So, when my friend Alex got bored on a longish car
trip, started scrolling through his phone, and happened to mention that there
is a definite order in which adjectives should be listed in English, I told him
to send me the information stat!
What I got was a quotation by Englishman and
“professional stickler” Mark Forsyth from his book The Elements of
Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. Ready for it?
Adjectives, Forsyth states “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 order in the slightest, you’ll sound like a maniac.”
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| Image: wikimedia commons |
Now, I’m not advocating that any of us actually use
this many adjectives with a single noun. Adjectives are like the martinis
writer Dorothy Parker knew intimately – to be taken “one or two at most.” Write
(or drink) three at your peril. Make it four and, well, let’s not go there.
In all my years of school grammar lessons, all the
years of critique partners and editors making snarky comments in the margins of
my stories, I’d never heard of this adjective order rule. Apparently, it’s
something native English speakers just unconsciously agreed on. It’s like a
secret handshake known only to the cognoscenti.
However, it is taken seriously in ESL classes, which sometimes
include worksheets to help students learn the order. (Another way to describe
that order, if you must exceed Ms. Parker’s “one or two” recommendation is to
place the adjectives that are most subjective -- that is, those that rely most
on individual interpretation – the furthest from the noun. In Forsyth’s
example, “lovely” is more subjective than, say, “little.”)
I was so entranced by this issue that I promptly
became a follower of Forsyth’s blog “The Inky Fool” and am seriously
considering the purchase of Elements of Eloquence. Because who knows
when I might be tempted, despite Ms. Parker’s warning, to indulge in a
congeries – “a bewildering list of adjectives or nouns.”
***
While considering, perhaps jealously, things
non-native speakers know that we natives don’t, I also happened on a discussion
of language use in an unexpected site – the career column of the science
journal Nature.
Author Roey Elnathan was pleading for more mentoring
to help scientists who are not native English speakers communicate their
research for global audiences. A native Hebrew speaker, Elnathan has studied
English as well as sciences in the UK and US and has lived in Australia for
nearly a decade. And although believing English an easy language “to convey
basic meanings. . . when meanings are
complex and technical, precision is a must. Then English becomes a difficult
beast to wrestle with.”
That’s where the language’s blessings become its
curses: an immense vocabulary and a grammar that offers multiple choices for
wording.
And unlike many of the languages Elnathan is familiar
with -- in addition to Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Italian, and French – English
“is at its most elegant when plain and simple. . . The genius of English at the
hands of a good writer is its rhythm, and that rhythm comes through
simplicity.”
Elnathan had me
wondering about the simplicity of my own writing. Now to mention serious fears
about its rhythm. For more suggestions – not just for scientists – see the full
column.
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