The hierarchy is not absolute, and there is some wiggle room among the “fact” categories – size, age, and so on – in the middle. It even went viral in 2016, when a journalist tweeted about “Things native English speakers know, but don’t know we know.” The tweet attached a paragraph by etymologist Mark Forsyth, explaining the adjective order rule and giving an example that uses all the categories according to the OSASCOMP hierarchy: “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.” Native speakers are often delighted when they learn about this law and discover how flawlessly they apply it.
Teachers of English as a second language encourage students to remember the acronym OSASCOMP. People learning English must memorize what is sometimes called “the royal order of adjectives” – opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose noun – and then make decisions about which adjectives fit into which categories. Or was it a little detective enjoyable novel? No, it was an enjoyable little detective novel! The first two sentences are difficult to understand because they violate a rule that native English speakers grasp intuitively: Multiple adjectives must be placed in a particular order. I just finished reading a detective enjoyable little novel.
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