A long time ago (perhaps 20 years ago), I heard a trivia question, but never heard the answer. The question was, “what is the only adjective in the English language that follows the noun it modifies?” This has been eating at me all this time, causing me 7,300 sleepless nights. Can anybody finally put my mind at rest and answer the question?
Do you mean like ‘The guy painted his car[n] white[adj].’? Or ‘The truant officer found the student[n] tardy[adj].’? ‘Court-martial’?
I can think of a few examples:
Attorney general, court martial, sergeant major, Whopper Junior, heir apparent, Estates-General.
A little Google Fu found the following examples:
The people present.
The students involved.
The man responsible.
In those examples, it’s functioning like a relative clause. Except that the relative pronoun and copula have been suppressed. This type of sentence works either way: “the people [who are] present,” “the students [who were] involved,” “the man [who’s] responsible.” It seems use the relative pronoun is optional in these cases.
What I haven’t gotten used to is when the relative pronoun is suppressed before a verb clause as in “It was beauty killed the beast.” I think this type of phrase must have become obsolete before I was born.
The general phenomenon, I just found out, is named the reduced relative clause. It can be just one word. It can be a noun, adjective, or adverbial clause. Its application can be pretty intricate and interesting, considering it just means removing a word or two. It can appear either when the verb is used as the main verb of an independent sentence, or when it’s part of a subordinate adverbial clause. In the latter, it changes the verb from active to passive and completely changes the meaning of the sentence. It’s a good example of syntactical fine tuning.
How about “He tripped the light fantastic”?..AMAPAC
Or “He’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible.”
Those are fixed expressions, many with French origin.
More to the point, I think that the OP is looking for an adjective that always, or usually, comes after the noun that it modifies. None of the adjectives in the above qualifies.
I suppose somebody could be thinking of “-in-law”, but I would consider that a bogus answer.
Elect?
How about galore which always follows the noun it modifies? You can say “He has talent galore.” But you could never say “He has galore talent.” There are many such adjectives. There is a word to describe this category of adjectives, but it escapes me.
I like that. It made me think of another one: aplenty.
But this implies a logical impossibility: that a twenty year old trivia question was based on a false premise.
Gry?
God Almighty, this is a tough one.
I’ve always wondered if the answer is “like,” but I’m not sure if it’s functioning as an adjective, adverb, or neither. “His reflexes are cat-like.” Is like an adjective, or is cat-like considered one word?
It’s the origin of adding ~ly to make adverbs from adjectives and nouns - Crept in steathi-lic. Forms like aplenty are really old nouns where the ‘a’ used to be ‘on’ or ‘in’ or ‘at’ and gave rise to the modern continuous tense “Men there were at fighting by the gate” => “Men were [a-]fighting by the gate”.
I’m not sure I follow the connection of the -ly thing to the rest of it.
That’s an interesting etymological point, but are you suggesting that aplenty is not a bona fide adjective because it derives from a prepositional phrase? Or is the point just that this explains why it comes after the noun?
These are called post-positive adjectives. Several of the Wiki examples have already been suggested here.
A pretty common version is in the naming of lakes: Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Superior, Lake Ontario, Lake Michigan, Lake Champlain, Lake George, etc. The name – though technically a proper noun – acts as a modifier of “lake.”
And though nobody asked, galore is a borrowing from Irish (Gaelic), where the phrase is an adverb: go leor. “Leor” itself is an adjective, but the particle go functions a little bit like English -ly. In Irish it means “sufficient, enough” as well as “a lot, plenty” (depends on context). I was going to say that it couldn’t precede the substantive, but my dictionary says it can, go leor airgid, “plenty of money.”
Heart of gold.