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malenkylizards t1_j6lvctw wrote

Reply to comment by sstrombe in ELI5: Why does the order of adjectives matter? by AbleReporter565

I feel like this needs vetting. From what I can tell this assertion has been attributed to like one source and from there passed around like it's fact. My gut tells me this is one of those things like "i before e," with tons of exceptions, ambiguities, and variation, but I admit i don't have the research.

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captainAwesomePants t1_j6lw2s1 wrote

I suppose the easiest way to demonstrate that would be to come up with a counterexample, but I can't think of one.

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malenkylizards t1_j6lwf78 wrote

One I saw earlier was "ugly, yella, no-good keister," which sandwiches color between two opinions.

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Skiptree t1_j6lwmm4 wrote

Doesn’t quite work however because “yella” in this case is really saying coward, right?

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malenkylizards t1_j6ly4pl wrote

Well, a lot of these things are really opinions, or colored by your feelings about them. If I call my dog a sweet little old girl, does it sound wronger if it's an 80 pound puppy GSD with an "old soul"?

But suppose you're right and we disallow anything outside of the opinion category, unless it can be shown to be objectively true. What if my keister was purple, because of the color of my pants? No opinion there. Ugly purple no-good keister sounds about as right or slightly better than ugly no-good purple keister.

I agree that the rule seems plausible because lots of parts of it work, and lots of examples of things sounding right or wrong come to mind, but it seeming plausible doesn't mean it's true, if that makes sense. I would want to see statistics. I want to see someone say "we ran this corpus of 30,000 books through a computer, used this natural language processor to categorize every string of consecutive adjectives, and found that such and such percent of them fit the rule perfectly. The violations were mostly of so and so"

Tbh I'm probably not going to do it or look into it too much, I ain't got time, and I'm sure there's a grad student this would be perfect for. But without a more rigorous analysis, I'd hesitate to pass on the rule as if it were true.

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nIBLIB t1_j6m0zw8 wrote

Yella isn’t a colour. It’s short for ‘yellow-bellied’ which means cowardly

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Etherbeard t1_j6mbif3 wrote

Assertions attributed to one source are how English wound up with so many fake rules like those outlawing split infinitives, starting sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions.

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Vampiric2010 t1_j6m07qe wrote

Isn't language full of assertions passed around as fact? Like how people incorrectly use the hard g for gif?

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Etherbeard t1_j6mbxqd wrote

This is absolutely true. For example, there are no rules in English barring the use of split infinitives, ending sentences in prepositions, or beginning them with conjunctions. These were all created by individuals who didn't like them stylistically. These rules percolated around and eventually got picked up by grammar-nazi school marms who drilled it into their students as though it were fact.

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flyingbarnswallow t1_j6m2abu wrote

Yes and no. Much of what is taught in schools and passed around between laypeople as the so-called rules is simply incorrect. However, linguistics is a field with many scholars, who, as the scientists they are, observe, experiment on, and model language. There are lots of theoretical debates, especially because linguistics as it stands now is a fairly young field, but that doesn’t mean misinformation is all there is.

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the1ine t1_j6ofqij wrote

Yes, because language has evolved (often in parallel) and is memetic. The whole thing is one big game of telephone. I believe this is why Stephen Wolfram is pushing to create a new form of language similar to maths that can be used to universally communicate anything. Because everything else is subject to history and context.

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