Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Everyone’s on the lookout for their next clever party anecdote for that awkward pause between the cheese course and dessert (I ...

Did you know there is a particular order to adjectives in English? When using more than one adjective to describe a noun, we have to put adjectives in a certain order for the sentence to make sense.

Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. It is a lovely warm August day outside, and I am wearing a green loose top. Does the second part of ...

Word order matters. Most people don’t think about it, but there is usually a specific order adjectives must appear in. For example, “the brown old big house” just doesn’t have the right ring — “the ...

Unlikely as it sounds, the topic of adjective use has gone “viral”. The furore centres on the claim, taken from Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence, that adjectives appearing before a noun ...

I regularly have cause to recall a scene from a novel called Madder Music, by Peter de Vries, in which the main character, a writer who specialises in polo, hears a match announcer telling newcomers ...