i think the weirdest thing we've learned about language is that adjectives go in a fixed order when more than one is used for the same noun, but 1) no one ever gets *taught* that and 2) everyone seems to get the order right regardless
@monorail yes, that is where we learned it from, hah
@monorail@glaceon.social @Felthry@awoo.space I only discovered recently that he received a degree in linguistics. I think I'd first found him by way of his language videos but then mostly thought of him in relation to his tech and other videos ("Tom Rants About Phone Numbers for Roughly Sixteen Minutes" is a fun one)
@Felthry We were taught that in English class, I think in high school! We were given the basic guideline of "opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin" and even though it doesn't account for every adjective it works well enough most of the time
@socks Hmm, perhaps it's taught to ESL students? It certainly wasn't taught to us and every native english speaker we know has been surprised to learn it
@Felthry Native speakers, anyway. It must be HORRENDOUSLY opaque!
@Felthry do you also enjoy tom scott's language files?
i was about to send a link and say "here's a fascinating video about this very topic" and then realized that it's pretty likely that's where you heard about it from :P