(And certainly no need to apologize for your teaching. If I’d had teachers who could recall details as you regularly do — your original “conventional hierarchy” example being a case in point — well, I can’t say I’d be any better off in the smarts or life-skills departments. But I’d have something else to inspire me!)

Very shrewd analysis of that clunky sentence. As with my own “clear, cold” example, I suspect the academic in question may have simply noticed the ticking of the clock and reached for something outlandish.

The thing that bothers me about that last sentence is that it is unnatural to use an indefinite rather than a definite article with a superlative, and the sentence can really only make sense if there is a known category of people who are termed “shortest students” and/or “shortest students from Italy” – something which is scarcely conceivable. The sentence only becomes ‘ambiguous’ because we struggle to untangle the intention behind its bad grammar. It obviously ought to be either “The shortest student in my class is from Italy” or “The shortest student from Italy is in my class”.

So says ailing Gerry.

In a 2007 column in the Christian Science Monitor, “Rules no one teaches but everyone learns,” Ruth Walker sets up the hierarchy this way:

Opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

She also points to a few other pages on the Web which address the matter, coming up with slight (or not-so-slight) variations on the theme.

Among her citations is a 2005 Q&A feature at The Atlantic, “Word Court” by Barbara Wallraff. (Aside: I’d like to see a dialogue between her and MoonRat.) This article brings up a related question: in what circumstances should we include commas among the string of adjectives preceding a noun? She cites Wilson Follett’s Modern American Usage in making a distinction between “superposed” and “parallel” adjectives:

A thoughtful, constructive, entertaining speech is a speech that is (1) thoughtful, (2) constructive, and (3) entertaining; but a battered old canvas fishing hat is not a hat that is (1) battered, (2) old, (3) canvas, and (4) fishing.

(The first example is a list of parallel adjectives; the second, superposed. Note that the second follows closely Walker’s hierarchy — the suggestion is that we don’t need commas if the adjectives appear in English’s “natural” order.

I also found a PDF version of a paper presented at a 2006 linguistics conference, which surveys a variety of what the author calls “Adjective Ordering Restrictions,” and frequently abbreviates as AOR. (Not to be confused with album-oriented rock.) It’s 10 pages long and includes glancing references to Mandarin Chinese and Greek. And it deals with exceptions to the norm, including similar constructions which introduce ambiguity — like this:

My class has a shortest student from Italy.

…concerning which, the author says:

It can either refer to an Italian student who is shorter than any other Italian student in my class, or it can be taken to mean that the shortest student in my class happens to be Italian.

I don’t care if it’s ambiguous or not (or, heh, only seems ambiguous). All I know is it’s a pretty awful sentence. As opposed to a pretty, awful one.

ReCaptcha is now trying to tell me how I should have my breakkfast coffee: one sugary. No, thank you.

The origin of the adjective hierarchy is an intriguing question. I think the convention is the same in most of the European languages.

That “conventional hierarchy” ordering is just what I was wondering about. Haven’t yet found other references to it, but that’s probably because I’ve rushed through the search. Still, as long as we’re woolgathering, I wonder why THAT order should prevail?

And now I’ll have to see for myself why you’ve got Catullus and Virgil pigeonholed into those separate venues.

But shouldn’t you be caught up in the HD version of Judgment at Nuremberg right about now?

That’s of less help with your “clear/cold” instance – unless we take ‘clear’ as being a colour; which I suppose it is, sort of. With a lot of these pairings, it’s just a case of us having developed an habitual collocation about their use.

I agree with DarcKnyt: “clear, cold” doesn’t mis-chime with me. But it is slightly jarringly non-standard. I think the key thing here is the insertion of a comma between the two adjectives, suggesting a pause for thought as you seek to develop the description, rather than just trotting out a single pre-packaged phrase. If you wanted the latter, it would have to be “cold clear morning”, I think.

By the way, if you search Froogville for Catullus or Barstool Blues for Virgil you will find traces of my own encounters with the Classics.

I myself never really got into speaking Latin, which struck me as just too flat-out weird. (Specialized in reading and writing it.) And yet, I think that adding signing to these presentations would have elevated it to a very special plane of dorkdom: APSL ASL.

Heh: reCaptcha is prorated major. I love the way these things juuuuuust about make a sort of half-sense.

I think “ish” will serve as a good explanation for now. :) I like it.

If you read the post I just threw up, you’ll encounter a real mouthful of an adjectival phrase: “new online super-duper improved.” In this case, the order doesn’t really matter; I was just piling stuff on. But the order does matter in terms of sound: “online new super-duper improved” definitely thuds to my ear (he said, scowling in cynth’s direction. But I think you may be right about the “clear, cold” example; the more I repeat it to myself, the less clunky it sounds.

cynth: Yeah, you’re right: you can actually make dead metaphors and cliches sound fresh again just by changing up the word order.

I won’t even bother asking whence the heck you managed to dredge up the Limpopo River quote, because I know you well enough to know that it just came directly out of that huge echoing Citizen-Kane-final-shot warehouse of a brain.

Jules: Whoa, a linguistics major? I don’t think I know anyone else who went that route, either, even almost went that route. Now, that would have earned you some dorkiness points.

The only language I know much of besides English is Latin, and I know that word order is somewhat (not entirely) less important because the parts of speech are almost all inflected in some way. (Which is why — one reason why — Latin sentences can/could so often dangle the verb waaaaay down at the end of a paragraph.) I suspect this all has something to do with the ways in which our brains are a product of our languages as much as (or even more than) vice-versa. Ish.

I used to request with the Intepreter Coordinator that I get assigned to that class and must have interpreted it five times in a row. But it never got boring.

Marta’s on to something. Has anyone ever explained — successfully, that is — why we do this in our language?

Cynth, I once memorized “The Elephant’s Child,” word-for-word. I can still pull it up from my brain — with practice. Nothing beats “the great gray-green greasy Limpopo River.” In fact, I like how Kipling eschews “once upon a time” for “in the High and Far Off Times.”

Ah, how sweet it is.