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]
Pish posh, this is not. Along the same lines, I have been thinking about how one refers to a couple. There seems to be a number of unwritten rules that make the order in which names are given: Male name first (too misogynistic these days?), name with less syllables first, name of the person you are closest too first. As and example, Liz and Edward sounds more correct to me than Edward and Liz. Taken to its extreme... Lady Catherine Wanewright and Bob... In this case, Bob seems like an afterthought. However, If Bob is mentioned first, he has the perception of a little more credibility - Bob and Lady Catherine Wanewright. In my opinion, Bob is more likely to hold his own against the titled woman.
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