Articles and Stories

November 15, 2025

Most of us speak English every day without realizing we’re following hundreds of unwritten rules. We don’t learn them in school, and yet we somehow get them right almost all the time. Mark Forsyth, author of The Elements of Eloquence, became briefly internet-famous when one of these invisible rules went viral.

It was a simple observation: in English, adjectives must follow a very specific order. You can say “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife” and sound perfectly normal. But if you change the order to “a silver French green rectangular old little lovely whittling knife,” you’ll sound like a confused robot. This order—opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose—is so deeply embedded that native speakers follow it without thinking.

Try it yourself. There are little green men, but never green little men. And no one eats Kat Kit bars. It just feels wrong.

The Sounds That Just Feel Right

There’s another rule we all know deep down: ablaut reduplication. Never heard of it? You still use it all the time. Think of phrases like tick-tock, flip-flop, or ping-pong. If you reversed the order, tock-tick, flop-flip, they’d sound ridiculous. This pattern isn’t random. When repeating words with vowel shifts, English always follows the pattern I-A-O. That’s why it’s bish-bash-bosh, not bosh-bish-bash.

This might sound trivial, but these small quirks are what give English its rhythm. They’re why we say clip-clop, zig-zag, and ding-dong. And they explain why the Big Bad Wolf sounds fine, even though it breaks the adjective order. The reduplication rule trumps the adjective one.

You Speak Fluent Grammar Without Knowing It

English tenses are another hidden system. We use about 20 of them without thinking. You probably say things like “I realized I’d been being watched” with ease. But try explaining that structure to someone learning English, and you’ll quickly realize how complicated it is. There’s even something called the future present, as in “The train leaves tomorrow.”

Add to this the tricky stress patterns, like knowing when record is a noun or a verb, and you start to see just how much English speakers subconsciously understand.

So next time someone says English is easy because it doesn’t have gendered nouns or fancy endings, just hand them a sentence like “I’m putting up with the guy I’m putting up, even though his put-downs put me out.” If they can survive that, they’re doing just fine.