{"id":33116,"date":"2016-09-08T06:30:23","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T18:30:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=33116"},"modified":"2016-09-05T23:14:33","modified_gmt":"2016-09-05T11:14:33","slug":"a-fun-thing-i-saw-on-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/09\/08\/a-fun-thing-i-saw-on-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"A Fun Thing I Saw On Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I thought it was fun anyway, but I am a writer and that by definition means a language person.<\/p>\n<p>This gem bounced into my Twitter feed via Matt Anderson of the BBC (@MattAndersonBBC) and fellow writer, Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) in Australia. So now you know it&#8217;s fully international in an Anglo-Australasian sort of way. (OK, that&#8217;s a pretty narrow definition of &#8220;international&#8221;, but still, wider than just NuZild.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, here&#8217;s the quote, which comes to you under the title:<\/p>\n<h3><em><span style=\"color: #333333;\">Things Native English Speakers Know, But Just Don&#8217;t Know We Know<\/span><\/em><\/h3>\n<p><em><span style=\"color: #333333;\">&#8220;&#8230;Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose-Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you&#8217;ll sound like a maniac. It&#8217;s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can&#8217;t exist.&#8221;<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p>Unless, that is, they were green great-dragons&#8230; (Sorry, just being a smart&#8230; I mean, <em>writer!<\/em>)<\/p>\n<p>Smart-alecking aside, the quote&#8217;s fun, innit? I love the idea of this implicit but invisible order to the language that we follow mostly unconsciously.<\/p>\n<p>If you have other examples of similar linguistic phenomena and\/or principles, I&#8217;d love to see them in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, I thought it was fun anyway, but I am a writer and that by definition means a language person. This gem bounced into my Twitter feed via Matt Anderson of the BBC (@MattAndersonBBC) and fellow writer, Alan Baxter (@AlanBaxter) in Australia. So now you know it&#8217;s fully international in an Anglo-Australasian sort of way. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funstuff","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33116"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33119,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33116\/revisions\/33119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}