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And as Gail Sherman observes, that principle operates at a pretty basic level…

There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is—a particular sequence to use when more than one adjective precedes a noun. There are exceptions, of course, because English is three languages in a trenchcoat. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, in general, the proper order is:

Opinion
Size
Physical quality
Shape
Age
Color
Origin
Material
Type
Purpose

Most people couldn’t tell you this rule, but everyone follows it. If you use the wrong order, it just sounds weird. If you have a fancy new blue metal lunchbox but call it a metal new fancy blue lunchbox, people might be worried you are having a stroke…

“There is a Royal Order of Adjectives, and you follow it without knowing what it is,” from @CambridgeWords via @BoingBoing.

* Tom Stoppard

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As we parse, we might send powerfully-phrased birthday greetings to a spare but graceful user of adjectives, Seymour Wilson “Budd” Schulberg; he was born on this date in 1914. A screenwriter, television producer, novelist, and sportswriter, Schulberg is best remembered for his novels What Makes Sammy Run? (1941) and The Harder They Fall (1947), as well as his screenplays for On the Waterfront (1954, for which he received an Academy Award) and A Face in the Crowd (1957).

As a sportswriter, Schulberg was most famously chief boxing correspondent for Sports Illustrated.  He wrote some well-received books on boxing, including Sparring with Hemingway and was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame (in 2002).

The son of B. P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Studios in its golden age, Budd wrote Moving Pictures: Memoirs of a Hollywood Prince, an autobiography covering his youth in Hollywood, growing up in the 1920s and 1930s among the famous.

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