According to numerous sources, J.R.R. Tolkien offered this memory of his first story — not the plot, not (really) the characters, not the setting, but the language:
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say “a green great dragon,” but had to say “a great green dragon.” I wondered why, and still do.
I wonder that kind of stuff all the time. Sometimes you can sort of make sense of the “rule”; for instance, in an animal breed or species name which includes a modifier, you can’t reasonably separate the modifier from the noun. A friendly wire-haired terrier works. A wire-haired friendly terrier doesn’t — even though it imparts exactly the same information.
Other times, maybe, something just “sounds right” one way but not another. It was the longest, most difficult journey I ever took: yeah, that’s all right. It was the most difficult, longest journey I ever took: if I wrote that sentence, I’d immediately want to revise it.
Even when the two adjectives are of similar lengths and/or sounds, one alternative chimes and the other thuds. A cold, clear morning: ding! A clear, cold morning: whoomp!
I can’t believe I have much of anything in common with Tolkien — and nothing at all uniquely in common. So: What’s up with this? Any theories?
_____________________
P.S. This sort of thing must drive copy editors — and ESL teachers — crazy.
Julie Weathers says
I was privileged to listen to some Nashville song writers talk about how they came up with some of their songs. One of them was the guy who wrote Blue Clear Sky that George Strait turned into a #1 hit.
He got his giant box of popcorn and his never-ending Coke and sat down to watch Forrest Gump. Gump said the line, “blue, clear sky,” and it triggered a song right there in the theater. He went home and wrote it.
The song writer was married to Mel Tillis’ daughter, so he rushed over to Mel’s house, where Mel was wandering around in boxer shorts. He sang the song for Mel and Mel said, “W-w-w-well, th-that’s pretty g-g-g-ood, but um, blue c-c-clear uh sky is wr-wr-wr-ong.”
Song writer went through the whole scene of how he came up with the song and said that was the way it should be. Mel relented and called George Strait. Strait listened to the song and said, “Son, I can’t sing that. We don’t talk like that in Texas.”
Song writer went through the whole story again about how he sat down with his gallon of popcorn and his never-ending Coke at the theater and the song just came to him.
Strait agreed to record the song as it was.
Obviously, this doesn’t work very often.
Wendy says
I’m just thrilled that he kept writing after the discouraging approach his mom took!
(By the way, one of my captcha words was “zombies”… you might want to look into whether or not zombies have invaded your blog. It could be a sign!)
John says
Julie: I love that story.
Love that everyone else was telling him No, CLEAR then BLUE but he kept playing — and trumping them with — the That’s the way it IS card. And you’re right about the rarity; I’m already resigned to having to fight, someday (hopefully in a pre-death context :), over Seems to Fit as a title.
Wendy: Yeah, thank God he didn’t get completely traumatized by the green-great/great-green issue. But it was still a cool lesson for him to have learned. (He also wrote somewhere that the phrase “cellar door” — not the meaning, but the sound — is almost universally regarded by native English speakers as among the most beautiful.)
Zombies are everywhere nowadays. You know about the book Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, right? And on one of the blogs I follow, I just read about Sock Zombies (“like a sock monkey, only undeader”: ha!).
marta says
As an ESL teacher I get this a lot. Usually I have no answer and must resort to, “This is how a native speaker would say it.” That satisfies most students. To the more persistent students I have to confess I have no idea why. Bad teacher.
Though what probably really is bad, is sometimes I have students put words together in such a way (and I’m too tired to think of a good example here) that no native speaker would do, but it is brilliant and understandable. I rarely correct these students–because what they said isn’t wrong, it just isn’t expected.
DarcKnyt says
Am I a moron for not hearing the “thud” from your last example the way Tolkien’s “green, great” thudded for me? ‘Cause “clear, cold morning” sounds okay to me. Really.
I always think changing the accepted order of adjectives around is a nice way to bring a fresh view to an old metaphor. Just by juggling words, we can make something seem unique when it’s actually well-trod territory. It’s like taking a new road through familiar counties; you see things in a new way.
Okay, maybe not.
Sorry. /dorkiness.
cynth says
I think what Darc Knyt is true in a way. Sometimes you just like the way the words-great, greasy, gray Limpopo river–sound together, but a new meaning is what you’re trying for, so I’m all for the switching of words! And never ask if John hears the Thud–it’s almost guaranteed he didn’t hear it except in his ear’s eye.
Recaptcha: chan-wicket!
Jules says
I used to interpret full-time at a university. A lot of the deaf students there at that time, maybe not surprisingly, were Deaf Ed majors. There was this prof there who taught a Linguistics course of sorts who would talk about this kind of stuff, and it used to fascinate me. If I could live parallel lives, you know, I’d go get that Linguistics degree. (I almost did once.)
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.
John says
Darc: My, but you do carry “self-deprecating” to an extreme. :) You, sir, are no moron. And “dorkiness” in this neck of the woods is a badge of honor — practically a requirement for entry!
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.
Jules says
I once interpreted a Latin class. Yes, into ASL. Now *that* was challenging. When the prof made the students go ’round the room and speak, there was lots of me-reading-fingerspelling involved.
I think “ish” will serve as a good explanation for now. :) I like it.
John says
Jules: Some day I should try to write up what I remember of my Latin classes. One relevant memory does jump out at me, though: that of the annual statewide conventions of the Association for the Promotion & Study of Latin (APSL). I mean, there were like whole freaking auditoriums (okay, all right: auditoria) full of people, listening to someone on stage speaking in Latin for, like, 15 minutes at a clip. Until the next speaker. And so on. It was wild.
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.
Froog says
As an amateur linguistics nerd and sometime ESL teacher, I can chip in that the ordering of types of adjectives is usually termed a ‘conventional hierarchy’, and it runs: number (cardinal or ordinal), size, age (incl. newness, recentness), other attributes, and – last of all – colour. Hence four new true blue shoes, or whatever.
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.
John says
Froog: Very happy you chimed in on this one, because I knew you’d be coming at it from multiple linguistic (and cultural) angles.
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?
Froog says
Well, I would have been if I had known that it was on. I am trying to protect myself by not checking the schedules too often.
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.
John says
Froog: Okay, now you’ve really inspired me on this adjective-hierarchy thing…
In a 2007 column in the Christian Science Monitor, “Rules no one teaches but everyone learns,” Ruth Walker sets up the hierarchy this way:
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:
(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:
…concerning which, the author says:
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.
Froog says
My, my, you are a wizard with that web-searching. My apologies for the incompleteness of my original AOR example. My sloppy teaching exposed!
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.
John says
Froog: You’re too kind. No wizardry required; just a boundless capacity for distraction.
(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.