This is something that I’ve always done just based on how it sounds. I’ve occasionally screwed it up and rearranged it, but it’s still based on whether or not it feels right. There has to be a linguistic rule here that makes one order work and another one sound clunky.
Bonus question: do these come from any specific place or does the order fulfill a specific need in a language or did they just kind of fall that way by accident?
I don’t think there is any universal “unified theory” rule to determine adjective order.
There are rules which deal with specific situations. In the expression bright red car, bright qualifies red, not car, so it has to precede red. Red bright car would simply be wrong.
But no such rule applies to, say, tall, dark and handsome stranger; grammatically, the adjectives would work just as well in any order. Is it simply idiomatic that we conventionally put them in the order stated? It may that handsome comes at the end because it depends on a subjective judgment. We observe that the stranger is tall and dark before we form the view that he is handsome, so there is a certain intuitive sense in putting handsome at the end.
But even that consideration disappears in a phrase like big fat man. There’s nothing wrong with fat big man; it’s just not idiomatic.
Here’s one attempt to describe the typical adjective order in English:
http://www.angelfire.com/wi3/englishcorner/grammar/rules/adjord.html
I agree with your general points completely. But I think there’s some reason to “big fat man” as opposed to “fat big man”, because 'big" modifies ‘man’ but partly also modifies ‘fat’. So the phrase is not just saying “man that is fat and also tall” but “man that is extra fat”.
But this just makes your point that 1) adjectives come before the word they’re modifying, so if an adjective is modifying another adjective, it comes first; and 2) sometimes the meanings of the words can affect order.
(and then, to a basketball fan “fat big man” means something specific “center or power forward who needs to lose weight” or equivalently “Shaq in the offseason” )
UDS nailed it in one. Adjective order is otherwise whatever sounds or looks good to you; of course, others may have a different opinion in any particular example. I remember, from his letters, that a young J.R.R. Tolkien was a little miffed when his mom said he had his adjectives in the wrong order when he wrote a child’s story about a “green great dragon.”
Wendell Wagner has linked to an excellent site which analyzes the idiomatic nature of adjective order in English. It’s not a rule that one can point to and say, “your sentence violates this rule”; it’s a flexible hierarchy that people internalize during years of learning English, and one which exerts a powerful influence when a listener is judging a speaker or writer. Skillfully defying the idiom can make you look like a genius; doing so without the skill makes you look like an idiot.
Although it would have you say “handsome, tall dark man”
Words the modify adjectives are adverbs, but you’re right they, in English, almost always precede the adjective they modify.
No, adverbs modify verbs. Adjectives modify nouns and other adjectives.
The usual terminology is that adjectives modify nouns, and adverbs modify everything else, including other adverbs. Consider “very”, for instance, which can only modify adjectives and adverbs, not nouns: It’s listed as an adverb, not an adjective.
Well adjectives also modify pronouns, and I don’t think anything modifies conjunctions or prepositions (or articles a type of adjective). Adverbs modify, verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs.
They modify everything else that can be modified, I should have said. And pronouns are a kind of noun. You can sort of modify a preposition (with an adverb) if it’s part of an adjectival phrase, though: “I’m feeling very under the weather”, for instance.
Of course, this is all just terminology: The set of words which modify verbs is quite distinct from the set of words which modify other modifiers, and there’s no real compelling reason (other than tradition) to call them both by the same name.
The official discussion is that adjectives modify nouns (or occasionally pronouns, when in disjunctive position, such as “He is ugly”); adverbs modify verbs (“He swore angrily”), adjectives (“a most unusual situation”), or other adverbs (“She said very tartly…”).
However, adjectives can modify noun phrases that include other adjectives, something that does not get addressed in grammar school grammar classes. Consider the meaning of “a dark green cucumber” – it is not a cucumber which is both dark and green, but one that is dark green in color. Yet “dark” is clearly an adjective, not an adverb. “Dark” modifies “green cucumber”, not just “cucumber.”
Pronouns are not a kind of noun. They are substitutes for nouns. And OldGuy was right when he said that words that modify adjectives are adverbs.
“Tradition” is what communicates.
In what way are they “sets” and “quite distinct” from each other? Is there another “set” for those words which modify nouns?
For the most part, we can’t apply logic to language rules. We can just describe general patterns and changes.