The Rule You Follow but Were Never Taught
Here’s a phrase that sounds perfectly natural: a lovely little old green knife.
Now try it this way round: a green old little lovely knife.
Nothing in the second version is grammatically broken. Every word is the same. But it sounds as if it was written by someone who learned English from a phrasebook in the dark.
English has an order for adjectives, and almost every native speaker follows it without ever having been taught it. The writer Mark Forsyth popularised it in his book The Elements of Eloquence, using the example of a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, and pointing out that rearranging it makes you sound slightly unhinged.
The usual sequence runs roughly like this: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose, then the noun. Lovely, little, old, rectangular, green, French, silver, whittling, knife. Linguists argue about the exact categories and where the boundaries fall, and in everyday speech we rarely stack more than two or three adjectives at once. But the tendency is strong enough that breaking it sounds wrong almost immediately.
There are exceptions, and the best one is a famous wolf. By the adjective order, it should be the bad big wolf, since opinion comes before size. But nobody says that. That’s because a second hidden rule takes over, called ablaut reduplication, which says that when you repeat a word with a changing vowel, the vowels tend to run in the order i, then a, then o. It’s why we say tick-tock, not tock-tick, zig-zag, ding-dong, flip-flop and chit-chat. With big bad, the i-a pattern wins. Once again, nobody taught us this. We just know.
Rules can also bend for emphasis. If you’re choosing between two knives, you might say “the old little one, not the new one”, stressing the age because that’s the point you want to make. Context outranks the default order, which is part of what makes language so flexible.
What fascinates me most, though, is how these rules get into our heads. Children pick up the adjective order from hearing thousands of examples, long before anyone could explain it to them. Most adults go their whole lives without being able to state it, while following it flawlessly every day. It’s a perfect example of what researchers call tacit knowledge: things we know how to do without being able to say what we know.
Organisations run on exactly the same kind of knowledge. Every workplace has an adjective order of its own: the unwritten rules about who speaks first in meetings, which emails need the CEO copied in, how blunt you can be in a report, and which “suggestions” from senior people are really instructions. Long-serving staff follow these rules effortlessly. Ask them to explain the rules, and most can’t.
New people, meanwhile, keep tripping over them. They’re like someone saying “green old little lovely knife”: technically nothing wrong, but everyone in the room feels it. And because nobody can say what the rule is, the newcomer gets the uncomfortable sense of having made a mistake without anyone being able to tell them what it was.
That’s why I think it’s worth occasionally trying to put the hidden rules into words. Not because every unwritten rule is a good one, but because you can’t examine, change or teach a rule that nobody has ever said out loud. And once it’s written down, some of them turn out to be lovely little old traditions worth keeping, and others turn out to be nonsense nobody had ever thought to question.
