Honestly, we all do it. Test it out.
Yep, hard to believe there are rules of English that we all follow but could never actually name.
The editor of BBC Culture, Matthew Anderson, brought to Twitter’s attention that we all follow this rule when describing something, Mashable reports.
The rule for adjectives is: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose, noun. If we use a different order, it does sound pretty strange.
The language revelation has received over 42k retweets and 61k likes on Twitter, and people were eager to know where this pearl of wisdom came from.
It turns out it’s from The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase by Mark Forsyth.
The passage reads:
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.
I can’t stop trying to think of an exception to this rule now.
