What’s strange about a noisy, Spanish, large, talking orange parrot?
Did you have to read that twice? I bet you did if your first language is English.
Why? Because the adjectives are in the wrong order.
Most of us aren’t aware of this guideline (I certainly wasn’t). But when we are using more than one adjective before a noun, there’s an order:
Determiner (a, the, this, my)
Observation or opinion (beautiful, ugly, delicious)
Size (large, tiny)
Age (young, old)
Shape (round, square, rectangular)
Colour (red, blue, black)
Origin (French, American, Chinese)
Material (wooden, furry, silk)
Purpose or qualifier (adjectives providing additional information (talking, broken, running, painted).
We wouldn’t say a plastic, purple large bowl or an Italian old beautiful painting. We also wouldn’t say My Greek Fat Big Wedding.
It’s a large purple plastic bowl. And a beautiful old Italian painting.
Thanks to The Language Nerds‘, I’ve discovered Mark Forsyth’s hilarious and helpful book on how to turn the perfect English phrase: The Elements of Eloquence.
I think it’s going to improve my old beige English messy writing.