The language rules we know - but don't know we know.

I came across this by chance and thought it may be of interest to my fellow authors:

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160908-the-language-rules-we-know-but-dont-know-we -know

Really fascinating! I certainly wasn't consciously aware of those rules.

Wow, it does make sense when you think about it. "Little green men" sounds right intuitively while "green little men" just sounds off-putting.

So often, we know the rules, even if we can't quite repeat them, we've lived with proper English for so long, we just know when something doesn't look or sound correct. Some of my personal pet peeves are correct usage of to, too, and two, or there, their, and they're and making sure the tense of the verb and adverb agree.

Proper English suffers so much online. Spelling, grammar and so forth are often atrocious. In the interest of brevity, particularly in emails or texts, things like "u" for "you." Understandable perhaps, but I still do not like it.

In a small example... I don't text much, so my English skills haven't been corrupted much by that source. At least, not yet. But a few months ago I had to furrow my brow to recall the proper spelling of the four-letter word "okay". It was then that I realized that I had been lazily using "OK" for years! So I have gone on an "OK" diet. Okay?

Quite a common spill-over from Textspeak among the students I teach is 'gonna'. They're pretty good at avoiding other obvious abbreviations or initialisms, but many seem to think 'gonna' is perfectly correct.

gonna a word? Betcha it isn't.

(and the spell checker did not flag a single thing wrong with this message)

Like most rules proposed for the English language, other than very basic rules of grammar, it's half true and it would be a big mistake to follow it slavishly. Yes, OPINION comes first for the good reason that you distinguish your opinion of the thing from its description - and often the main message you want to convey IS your opinion of it. But it doesn't work in swearing: "That big red stupid ******* ugly car parked outside my house". Otherwise, order can vary according to emphasis or meaning. For example, "that lovely little old...knife" sounds fine, but so does "that lovely old little...knife". In the second example, "old" probably indicates affection for the thing as well as its age.

As for the Big Bad Wolf, I have a different suggestion for why it sounds right. Bad here is not an opinion word as in "the bad, long grammatical lecture". Bad is part of the essential nature of the wolf: it's a Bad-wolf. In the fairy tale, someone is not going to offer excuses for the Wolf or suggest that it might have been justified in its actions - which is why a sympathetic Big Bad Wolf in Tom Holt's "Snow White and the Seven Samurai" is so funny.

mj2001
bigger green men are now illegal in Finland. We don't say it (loud), but those green men may come from east, Putinland. (green men = unmarked soldier)