While driving my 11 year old daughter back home from track practice, she announced that she would inherit the colt, (her mother’s Dodge Colt} when she becomes 16. Now this is just not going to happen, with both her parents having been teenage car owners based on personal earnings, and her much older sister never was given a car either. She obviously was planting ideas and pushing.
Now I’m always impressed with this girl’s spunk and cando attitude so I responded " Daughter, its all right to think big and be positive, but in this case you’re just as likely to end up with a male young horse (i.e. not very likely) than with your mother’s car. Immediately upon uttering the phrase, I felt a slight discomfort as if it came out wrong. Should I have said ***young male horse *** which definitely sounds more correct?
I’ve been mulling over this problem for the last 24 hours and its been bugging me. For another more clear example that there must be some convention for order in sequence of adjectives try *** basketball black player*** as opposed to *** black basketball player ***.
** So is there some grammatical rule on the order of sequence of adjectives? **