3 ms·

I dont really think thats a valid distinction. Is there a false/different final "thing" that is being described?

• bobthepanda 5y ago
  To make this more apparent, “that big yellow bird” just means any old ordinary bird, whereas people would probably take “that yellow big bird” to refer to Big Bird the Sesame Street character. So that can totally be a valid parsing of the sentence.
• ericbarrett 5y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "false," but "different," definitely. Hyphens have fallen somewhat out of fashion in modern English but they can provide clarity in these cases. Let's change the noun. If a native speaker says, "big red hands," you can normally assume they're speaking of large hands which are colored red. However, if they say "red big hands," this parses to "red big-hands," meaning "big-hands" is treated as a title, or perhaps a brand. You might see this title capitalized: "red Big-Hands". Going back to the first example, if you mean "red hands" as a title, you could write "big Red Hands" or better yet, "big Red-Hands," meaning something big with the title Red-Hands. Since the adjective order is the same as grammatically conventional English, the hyphen helps distinguish the writer's meaning. But nowadays I find writers often leave it out when the adjective order implies the multi-word title.
  • lupire 5y ago
    big brown hairy foot. hairy brown bigfoot. :-)
  • bobthepanda 5y ago
    At least when I was growing up, it was taught to avoid hyphens because the standards at the time (or at least the teachers teaching them) strongly disliked hyphens because they were associated with mid-word line breaking.