Pedro doesn’t care much for doing tricks right now.
In yesterday morning’s open thread, p.a. (First!) mentioned this BBC article about Matthew Anderson’s tweet about Mark Forsyth’s claim (I think this sentence has gotten away from me) in his book “The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase” that:
As Mark Liberman and his commenters point out at Language Log, Forsyth’s rule – a fixed order of adjectives from which an English speaker can never depart without sounding like Donald Trump on a meth and moonshine bender – is mostly bollocks. Beware of anyone who tells you that there are any unbreakable rules in English – a language which has fifteen different kinds of exceptions from every purported rule, just to fuck off the foreigners.
The reality is much more interesting and complex than Forsyth’s unbreakable rule – yes, we tend to use adjectives in a particular order, but we also swap them around depending on what idiom we are using, what effect we are trying for, what particular meaning we are trying to convey. “Grumpy old drunk lady” is subtly different to “Drunk, grumpy old lady”, although perhaps not when she’s pressed up in your face and breathing booze at you. Most of us would say “ugly little hands” but “big ugly hair”. We take pleasure in the leaping, lilting rhythm of words like “tiny fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret wearing shitgibbon” or “limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea” – even if that “slow” (being, I suspect, opinion under Forsyth’s Rule) should really go in front of all those colours, and definitely not in the middle of them, unless you want to sound like a maniac, Mr Thomas.
There’s a lot of good stuff in the Language Log thread, including links to some very interesting articles.
Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Why is the Main Stream Media not talking about how it’s ok to refuse to make a Trump 2016 cake for a 17 year old girl?