January 13, 2025

The Brown Quick Fox…

I was listening to a July 2024 episode of Mignon Fogarty’s Grammar Girl podcast in which she talked about a rule-of-thumb concerning the order of adjectives. That’s something that most of us don’t think much about. We instinctively order adjectives in a way that “sounds right.” (I think of what Joan Didion once said about grammar, “grammar is a piano I play by ear.” )

But I was intrigued to think about why most of us would write the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and not a brown quick one? Do we agree that we like the sound of big, blue bike and not blue, big bike, even if both communicate the same information? What about the bad, big wolf?

So what is the rule-of-thumb? It goes like this, in reverse order: OPINION (ugly, beautiful, interesting); SIZE (tiny, big, square, round); AGE (new, young, old); SHAPE (square, round); COLOUR (brown, red, slate gray); ORIGIN (Canadian, German, Japanese); MATERIAL (wool, silk, copper, wood) ; PURPOSE (shopping, eg: “shopping” bag; sewing, eg: “sewing” machine). Sadly, OSASCOMP isn’t an especially useful mnemonic to help you remember it.

Although there are different views on why you’d order adjectives in that way, a point of agreement (and one that makes sense to me) was raised by Danish grammarian Otto Jespersen in 1922: for example, the one closest to the noun is the most critical and specific, one.  (Thinking of that bike, big is vague — how big? — whereas blue is more specific. (Although royal blue would be even more so.)

British writer and grammarian Mark Forsyth wrote about it in his 2013 book, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, and three years later it was tweeted and went viral. (Don’t worry, I somehow missed it back then, too.)

Of course, rules are meant to be broken and many writers have broken this one, so long as the result was musical to the ear. And, of course, there are only so many adjectives one can reasonably use. Two or three, maybe? What is certain is that only a writer with a tin ear for language would follow the rule of adjective order literally and write: The woman wore a beautiful, full-length, new, sleek, rose-coloured, French, silk evening gown.