Blows My Mind

 Order your Words

Hope you have a good day,

Say it in another way:

“Hope your day is good”,

Would you change it if you could?

Same sentiment, different ring,

You can do this with most anything,

Sentence arrangement is fairly versatile,

It mostly depends on your personal style,

However, adjectives must have a particular order to their usage:

We don’t know why this is true; it’s elusive,

There is no green big dragon; he is a big green dragon,

There is no red heavy wagon; it’s a heavy red wagon,

The order of descriptive adjective follows this rule:

(Opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose)

It’s not something that you learn in school,

Innately, we know what order to describe this lovely knife:

“Lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife",

Change the order in any way, and it is not logical,

This revelation fascinates me, and is somewhat comical,

It’s like a friendly large young white African elephant is in the room!

Am I the only one whose mind has gone “BOOM’?

Blows my mind when I learn something new about syntax,

No smoke and mirrors, just the facts,

I credit this information to a tweet I read, (and I was like: what?),

By BBC’s Matthew Anderson, a self-proclaimed grammar nut,

Who quoted it from a 2013 book by author Mark Forsyth,

May this tidbit give you a reason to be blithe!

Tammy Harvey

Written:  7/1/2021