A Mystery Solved

 

A Mystery Solved

For those of you who read last month’s entry, about “Red Little Riding Hood,” you’ll recall that in English adjectives must be in this order: opinion/size /age/shape/ color/ origin/ material/ purpose Noun. I cited this example: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.

(If you didn’t read last month’s entry, this one will make more sense if you go back and do so. For your own benefit. Really.)

Then I mentioned the exception to this rule, the example of the “Big Bad Wolf.” According to the rule, shouldn’t it be the “Bad Big Wolf”? Yes. So what’s going on?

In English when we have two words following each other that are largely the same, but in which we’ve changed the vowel, we must ensure that those vowels follow this order: I-A-O. Thus we have “pitter patter” (I-A) To say “patter pitter” (A-I) sounds wrong.

Linguists call this (you might want to get a pen or pencil and write this down) the ablaut reduplication rule. Other examples? We say flip-flop and tit-for-tat. To say flop-flip or tat-for-tit just sounds wrong. Same with bish bash bosh, which Wiktionary defines as “indicating the completion of a task with efficiency.” Definitely not bash-bish-bosh. The ablaut reduplication rule takes precedence over the adjective-order rule.

Back to the adjective rule for a moment… The book describing these mysteries, Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, shares an anecdote about J. R. R. Tolkien, whose first venture into writing fantasies like The Lord of the Rings began as a 7-year-old. It was about a “green great dragon,” he told his mother. Honoring the adjectives rule, she told him there was no such thing; it had to be a “great green dragon.”

Forsyth says “Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.”

[300 words]

 

Red Little Riding Hood

 

Red Little Riding Hood Has anyone ever told you have a “tell,” something you do without realizing it? Perhaps it’s tugging on your left ear when you’re nervous. In language too we often do things unconsciously. Take adjectives, for example. In English, adjectives normally precede the nouns they’re describing: a dead walrus, a tearful gangster. (Not always, though; we have “heir apparent,” not “apparent heir.”) But what fascinates me is the unspoken rule regarding the order of adjectives we might use, as in “Little Red Riding Hood.” We can’t have “Red Little Riding Hood.” Our ears tell us this is wrong. But why? Author Mark Forsyth explains in his book The Elements of Eloquence that in English, adjectives must be in this order: opinion/size /age/shape/color/origin/material/purpose Noun. He gives this example: a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Another writer comments, “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.” Because size must come before color, you need to have Little Red Riding Hood. And if you want to say she’s a “good girl,” you need “good little girl” where opinion (good) must come before size (little). That’s why “little good girl” sounds weird. Same with “An ugly old Belgian hunting dog.” You can’t switch to “an old Belgian ugly hunting dog” or “a Belgian hunting ugly old dog.” It’s a complete mess.   That’s why we have the rule. But wait… What about the “Big Bad Wolf”? Here we have size before opinion. Shouldn’t it be “Bad Big Wolf.” Why do we say this? In next month’s blog we’ll look at the explanation for this grammatical minor strange rule. [300 words]