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Drunk and Disorderly Construct
A once viral grammar rule about which adjectives should go where doesn’t reflect actual English usage. Well, not all of it, anyway.
If you are a native speaker of English, you probably know that the phrase “my Greek fat big wedding” is very, very wrong, but you probably don’t know why.
In English, there is often a rigid order of adjectives that come before a noun. For instance, you can say “my big fat Greek wedding” but not “my Greek fat big wedding” or even “my fat Greek big wedding.” Native speakers know these rules intuitively because they have been immersed in English for many years. However, it is hard for English as a Foreign Langauge (EFL) speakers to know what this order is because different languages have different orders (or no order at all).
The order EFL speakers are commonly taught is “opinion, size, age or shape, colour, origin, material, purpose.”
Several years ago, this grammar rule was even highlighted in a viral tweet (that quotes Mark Forsyth’s excellent book, The Elements of Eloquence).
