Ordering Your Adjectives

It’s time to make good on my pledge to write about the three most interesting topic suggestions I got during the Grammar Girl book giveaway contest. Actually, I got significantly more than three suggestions that would be interesting to write about, and they’ll be a source of inspiration in months to come. But I only have three books to give away, so with some difficulty I’ve settled on the three topics that I’m going to write about first. (Well, first, second, and third, actually, but you get my generalized meaning of first, don’t you? Of course you do.) I’ll start with a suggestion from Carlos Iriarte, who wrote:

As a non native speaker, I would love to see a discussion about the possessive apostrophe, or the proper order of adjectives.

Carlos, you’ll have to go somewhere else to learn more about apostrophes, but as it happens, adjective ordering is a topic that I’ve been curious about for years. I remember trying to do a research paper on it as a grad student, for a seminar in lexical semantics, and finding the topic so complicated that I repeatedly narrowed the focus of the paper, eventually ended up with a sorry piece of work investigating restrictive and non-restrictive uses of just one single adjective, and got the paper back with the comment, “I would not spend any more time pursuing this line of research.” But a blog post, I think I can handle.

The Forensic Fringe

My wife and I have watched several episodes of Fringe now, mostly out of curiosity due to Glen’s being on the writing staff. Parts of each episode reveal more of the show’s overall “mythology” (hey, Ben, how long has mythology been used to refer to the slowly revealed backstory in a TV show that prominently features weirdness?), but each episode also has one particular mystery or problem to solve, and the solution always involves some kind of fringe science. In this respect, it’s like Numbers, where each week the solution comes from some kind of mathematics. Also as in Numbers, the progression from having the crazy idea that just might work, to actually implementing it, to solving the problem, is really fast. And the crazy idea always works.

This is a greater barrier to disbelief-suspension in Fringe than it is in Numbers, because in Numbers, the mathematical concepts are sound, but in Fringe, it’s all based on pseudoscience. What I’d like to see on this show is a situation where eccentric scientist Walter Bishop thinks they just might be able to enable agent Olivia Dunham to use, let’s say, telekinesis in order to avert some disaster. He and his team, in less time than it takes to buy, have delivered, and install a high-definition TV and connect it to your cable box, gather and set up equipment that it would take well-funded university labs weeks just to acquire. They hook up Dunham to the device, and … it just doesn’t work. Bishop’s son Peter is stunned.

“I can’t believe it didn’t work!” he says.

“Well, this is fringe science we’re talking here,” says Dunham’s assistant Astrid (a linguistics major, BTW). “Just because they call it fringe science doesn’t mean it’s not bullshit.”

But aside from Astrid’s major in college, what does any of this have to do with linguistics? During one of the episodes, I got to thinking, “This isn’t so much fringe science as forensic science.”

But on second thought: “Wait, no, this baloney is definitely fringe science.”

I thought about it some more: “No, no, they’re using it to solve crimes. It’s forensic science!”

Suddenly I realized: It didn’t have to be one or the other. It was both! It was … forensic fringe science! Fringe forensic science! Wow, this is like sweet mashed potatoes all over again. I got zero hits for both fringe forensic science and forensic fringe science, both in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and with Google. For some reason, there doesn’t seem to be much call for such a term. But if there ever were, what would determine which f-word came first?

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Stuffing, Dressing, and Sweet Mashed Potatoes

I made my lunch today out of Thanksgiving leftovers. It’s the first time in at least a decade that I’ve done that, because it’s the first time our family has had Thanksgiving dinner here instead of at my wife’s uncle’s house. I loaded the plate with the good, juicy dark meat that there was plenty of, not the dry white meat that everyone else so strangely prefers. Then some of the stuffing — oh, wait, I can just hear my dad saying that it’s not stuffing unless you’ve actually stuffed the turkey with it. It’s dressing. If you go calling the mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that my mom would cook in a baking dish stuffing, people will get it confused with that portion of the same mixture of breadcrumbs, eggs, turkey stock, and herbs that actually got cooked inside the bird. Maybe the distinction is worth making, since the inside-the-bird stuffing has soaked up some of the juices from the turkey and tastes somewhat different from the baking-dish-stuffing. But on the other hand, if I call it dressing, people could confuse it with what you put on your salad.

Another dish that my wife had picked up for the meal, she referred to as sweet mashed potatoes. That sounded like an interesting recipe. Not good, necessarily, but interesting. I like my mashed potatoes buttery and salty, not sweet. As it turned out, however, what was in the container was not mashed potatoes that had been sweetened, but mashed sweet potatoes. Mashed sweet, or sweet mashed? If an adjective and a noun have fused into a compound noun, then other adjectives can’t go putting them asunder: spoiled hot dogs is grammatical, but hot spoiled dogs isn’t — at least, not with the same meaning as you get with spoiled hot dogs. So in my grammar, it has to be mashed sweet potatoes, since sweet potato is a compound noun (as evidenced by the stress on sweet), and mashed potatoes is not (with its stress on potatoes). It looks like most other speakers agree, since I got 200K Google hits for mashed sweet potatoes and less than 1000 for sweet mashed potatoes. Even among those hits, though, I didn’t find any that referred to mashed white potatoes that had been sweetened; mostly they referred to what I would call mashed sweet potatoes, though a few were talking about a dish containing potatoes and sweet potatoes. Maybe for those few people for whom mashed sweet potatoes and sweet mashed potatoes mean the same thing, mashed potatoes is as much a compound as sweet potato is, leading to variation in naming something that qualifies as both. One website even used both phrasings to refer to the same item.

BTW, for a fascinating investigation of when and why Thanksgiving came to be (for many, but not all people) pronounced with stress on the giv-, see this post from Mark Liberman at Language Log.

Straiten Out Your Syntax

So I’m sitting here deciding which tracks to rip from a couple of George Strait CDs. I grab some of them because they’re so darn catchy. For example, I know that if I listen to “Fool-Hearted Memory,” I’m going to be whistling, singing, or hearing it run through my head for the next two days.* Even better are the ones that are good ear-candy with clever lyrics, too. The wordplay in this upbeat swing/two-step still cracks me up:

Like the Pony Express in the wild wild West
I’ll ride hard all night long.
I can saddle up fast, get you there first class,
Long before the dawn.
You know your mail’s gonna get to you
come snow, rain, sleet, or hail
‘Cause I’m a top-flight, hold-you-tight, get-you-there-by-daylight,
do-you-right overnight male.

But what to make of the song “Blue Clear Sky“? Yes, that’s right, “blue clear,” not “clear blue.” Any native English speaker knows you can’t do that, separating a color adjective from the noun it modifies. Doug and Adam never let me get away with Clifford the Red Big Dog when I’m reading to them (or for that matter, the Bad Big Wolf). The songwriter must have had a reason for doing this. Maybe he (or she) is rhyming it with nuclear somewhere. Not a perfect rhyme, but clever enough to score a few points. But, as it happens, there is no blue clear / nuclear rhyme in the song. The phrase mainly shows up in the chorus:

Here she comes, a walkin’ talkin’ true love,
Sayin’ I’ve been lookin’ for you, love.
Surprise! Your new love has arrived
Out of a blue clear sky.

No excuse! Blue and clear could easily be switched with no effect on either the rhyme or the meter. And every time I listen to the song, that blue clear business is going to catch me. The tune had better be a good one in order to outweigh that little bit of annoyance that’s going to come with every listen.

Sorry, “Blue Clear Sky.” You don’t make the cut.

*Hey, did you catch my “Friends in Low Places” coordination in that sentence?

Make Like a Chicken and Split

The newest (as far as I know) addition to the linguistiblogosphere is Heidi Harley’s HeiDeas (thanks to Semantic Compositions for quickly noticing and announcing it). In her second post she asks: Why is it grand theft auto, instead of grand auto theft, or auto grand theft? She has a reasonable story for why it’s not auto grand theft (modifiers in compound nouns, such as auto in auto theft, occur closer to the noun than other adjectives), but that still leaves auto grand theft a theoretical possibility. My first guess was that it was useful to have grand theft at the front for easier listing in law references, but the trouble with this explanation is that it’s dangerously ad hoc. That is, if it’s true, why don’t we have lots of other compounds that get lexicalized head-first this way? Thyroid cancer may appear in a medical book’s index as cancer, thyroid, people still refer to it as thyroid cancer and not cancer thyroid. (Comments along these lines from several linguabloggers appear after Harley’s post.) But despite the shakiness of this kind of explanation, I still favor it for another strangely ordered compound noun I’ve seen…

In the meat section at the grocery store, I see packages of split chicken breasts, labeled

Chicken Split Breasts

That sounds so klunky it brings me up short every time. Even a little kid would know to put the adjective split first, leaving the compound chicken breasts intact. Chicken split breasts sounds like breasts that have been split by a chicken (or chickens). Chicken split breasts causes one to wonder what kind of thing a “chicken split” might be. Would it be anything like a banana split? I don’t think I’d want to eat a chicken split. And where would the breasts on a chicken split or banana split be located? Would they be the three scoops of ice cream? And wouldn’t that be really strange, referring to something that comes in threes as a breast?

After those thoughts have run their course, I just figure that the packagers didn’t like having the word split breaking up the chicken-first pattern on the rest of the shelf: chicken thighs, chicken drumsticks, chicken wings, split chicken breasts. Swap split and chicken and conformity is achieved.

But what about pick of the chick?