It was J.R.R. Tolkien who first wrote, in a reminiscence of his childhood and of an early effort at fantasy writing, that one cannot refer in English to a "green great dragon." Size must come before color. It must be a great green dragon. He also expressed his continuing puzzlement, as boy and man, about this philological fact. Recently, someone among my FB friends posted a photo of a book, author unspecified and unknown to me, which addresses the point more comprehensively. According to this unsourced book, the proper list is: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose Noun. So one could encounter a terrifying great ancient smooth-lined green demon-sired flesh-and-blood gold-guarding dragon. Then presumably edit down the adjectives to just two, keeping the order. Is this a Chomskyan thing or a Skinnerian thing? If different languages have different preferred adjective orders then we might describe this as a Skinnerian discovery. The 'proper...
