“[A] one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple people eater”

There’s an interesting phrase in Forrest Gump that became the title of a song by George Strait: “out of the blue clear sky.” Most people would have said, “out of the clear blue sky,” but the Forrest Gump character, not being like most people, re-orders the adjectives.

Why is the normal phrase “clear blue sky” instead of “blue clear sky”? An article by Ruth Walker, posted on the Christian Science Monitor, suggests an answer.¹ Apparently there are rules in the English language for ordering adjectives. Native speakers are not taught these rules — we simply absorb them. But people who learn English as a second language must consciously learn them. According to some charts used to teach these rules, the order of adjectives goes like this:

  opinion :: size :: age :: shape :: color :: origin :: material :: purpose

If we apply the theory to the title of this post (a phrase from Sheb Wooley’s The Purple People Eater), we see that “one-eyed” and “one-horned” must come before “purple,” because when listing adjectives, shape comes before color. Frankly I haven’t figured out why "flyin’ ” falls between shape and color. Maybe the unusual ordering of the adjectives is what makes the song memorable; it jars our expectations.

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¹Hat tip to Ceely’s Modern Usage.