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Comment by jesprenj | Hacker News Reader

What about the effect where for some pairs of words that don't theoretically have ordering preference (kiki/bouba vs bouba/kiki), (plus/minus vs minus/plus), (on/off vs off/on), (positive/negative vs negative/positive) have some psychological order that most people use and if the other ordering is used, it sound weird?

Does this effect have a name?

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Even among words that do theoretically have an ordering preference, some people have different habits. I knew someone who habitually said "three or two", rather than "two or three".

Leaving aside the effect of prosody mentioned in another comment, I think the rest of it is habit, together with the brain's tendency to group things. If you're used to hearing "plus or minus", your brain may be grouping it together into a phrase whose meaning you understand directly without decomposition, so if you hear "minus or plus" there's a moment of having to map the components to the composite meaning, together with wondering if the speaker intends the difference to have a meaning.

(In mathematics, there's a reason to have both ± and ∓, since you can use them both in the same equation when you need "minus when the other one is plus, and plus when the other one is minus". For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".)

I don't know if this has a name, but if it does I'd love to know it.

> For instance, a±b∓c means "a+b-c or a-b+c".

I feel like this would be less confusing if rendered as "±(a+b-c)". It's the same amount of cognitive effort for figuring out the second term/factor, but you get the first one for free.

that makes a and -a

What you’ve suggested is not equivalent. The a is always taken without negation, and that’s not the case in your rendering.

Ah. "a±(b-c)" then.

The fact I made that mistake in the first place just makes me more convinced the original form is unnecessarily complex to parse.

You're too fixated on the example. It's obviously used in cases where you cannot group like that:

    (-b ± sqrt(b² - 4ac)) / 2a = 2c / (-b ∓ sqrt(b² - 4ac))

"three or two" means "likely three, maybe two"

"two or three" means "likely two, maybe three"

Here, the ordering is significant and has nothing to do with a habit.

That's not a common connotation; I've never once seen anyone use those phrases to mean that. "two or three" does not typically have any connotation of either being more likely.

Might be something specific to where you are?

What I described is how this construct is used in every place I lived.

Have you ever lived in the UK? Because I've never thought of "two or three" as meaning that two is more likely than three.

Are you sure that other people actually mean this when they say it, or are you just adding the extra connotation in your head?

Also I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone say "three or two". That sounds weird, like saying "fork and knife".

Not in the UK, no. But I did live in Canada, the US and across Europe.

Not that it's commonly used and not with 3 and 2 specifically, but when used and the pair is inverted, it's meant to convey that the former is more likely. That's just like ... common sense, really.

Lest anyone draw the conclusion that this is a US thing, it certainly is not. I've lived in many places throughout the US and have never heard anyone say "three or two". Nor does "two or three" carry the connotation that two is likelier. A closer fit to that would be "a couple", which formally means two, but sometimes means "a small number".

In (US?) English if you were to describe some thing and you had many adjectives for its size, color, origin, age, a visual pattern like "polka dot" or striped, and so on - many native speakers (at least in my region) would intuitively assemble that clause in the same order as each other without really being able to clearly articulate why. There are some supposed grammar rules that inform it but in my circles people just explain it as basically due to vibes. It was definitely not anything I remember from my public school education growing up.

If I'm describing a large, heavy, square, shiny, metal, block - that's the order that feels right for me. If I try shifting any pair of those around it just feels weird and the farther apart they appear in my original ordering, the weirder the swap would feel for me. "square metal heavy shiny large block" has awful 'mouthfeel', as it were. It's also a bit jarring to hear aloud.

Big shiny square metal block doesn’t look so bad to me, but big shiny heavy square metal block does. Perhaps big it is the switch back and forth… big and heavy are fuzzily size-like characteristics while shiny is not…

Is a big shiny square metal block the same thing as a big square shiny metal block? I’m not sure. I think the former is a big square metal block which happens to also be shiny, while the latter is a big square block made of a shiny type of metal.

Does that make any sense at all?

I love the examples in your second paragraph - that helps make the point that they're not entirely commutative. Still, I couldn't write a nice generalizable rule on why I do agree with your breakdown of these examples.

It is funny that shininess is a characteristic that can be attributed to the block, or the metal that makes up the block, despite the block being made of the metal!

Linguists apparently have characterized this phenomenon and call it the “Royal Order of Adjectives” [0]:

1. Quantity or number (e.g., “two”)

2. Quality or opinion (e.g., “lovely”)

3. Size (e.g., “big”)

4. Age (e.g., “old”)

5. Shape (e.g., “round”)

6. Color (e.g., “red”)

7. Origin (e.g., “French”)

8. Material (e.g., “wooden”)

9. Purpose (e.g., “sleeping” in “sleeping bag”)

[0] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/

The exceptions to this are also interesting to see. For example, “stainless-steel hex nut” or “designer little black dress” both violate the standard ordering, which would predict “hex stainless-steel nut” and “little black designer dress”.

These exceptions tend to arise with stock phrases such as “hex nut” or “little black dress”. In that case the entire phrase, including adjectives, is treated as the noun, with additional adjectives prepended.

Well, this is because a hex nut has a purpose and it is for you to hex your lost 10mm wrench.

I would have thought that little black designer dress was correct. Designer little black dress feels incorrect. The L and BL in Little and black and then the Ds in designer and dress also lend an alliterative flow to “little black designer dress” that is not there for “designer little black dress”

I think the dress example is not super great because “little black dress” is an expression or something. It is like an accessible and inexpensive but still nice and fashionable dress.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_black_dress

So I think a little black designer dress would be a designer dress which happened to be little and black. A designer little black dress would be a dress of the “little black dress,” variety, which also has the trait “designer” applied.

It's not really a hard and fast rule, but certain classes of deviation from it will certainly sound off. I don't think it's commonly explicitly taught to native speakers (at least I've never heard of it being taught in schools here) but it is, as I understand it, commonly taught to people learning English as a second language. https://icaltefl.com/adjective-order/

The adjective order thing is a bit overwrought—the basic ordering rule is "more essential qualities bind closer to head". That's not a comprehensive rule, and to the extent how saliently essential qualities should be considered is vibes-based and not culturally universal, but it does quite well at explaining some apparent exceptions ("Chinese green tea" > ?"green Chinese tea") and implications of violating the "rule".

Yes, there's a Vsauce short about that, but given the amount of them there's no way I'll find it...

Edit, found it another way: "Irreversible binomial" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreversible_binomial

Reading examples of unwritten rules in the English language always feels kind of unsettling to me. Like the order adjectives are supposed to appear in.

Yes. As per etymologynerd, English speakers tend to like trochaic stress rhythm in sentences, like "salt and pepper" or "lee and sophie" where a different ordering sounds weird.

Maybe, but there are plenty of counter examples:

“Chicken and egg”

“Cookies and cream”

“Heaven and Earth”

“Chapter and verse”

Seems like some phrases just are a certain way, and inverting them sounds wrong just because that’s what we’re used to hearing.

I think it's entirely what we're used to. Mainly when I hear one the other way around it's a non-native speaker, but sometimes the inverted order is used for effect, e.g. A Song of Ice and Fire sounds off-kilter, like its world and characters.

These examples all consist of a trochee followed by an iamb--another word for this specific metrical foot is choriamb [0].

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choriamb

I've noticed that comparing languages - e.g. in Hebrew they say "less or more" instead of the English "more or less".

Same in Greek, now that you mention it.

You might be interested in reading up on branching and related concepts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branching_(linguistics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-directionality_parameter

That seem completely unrelated/off-topic. Those are patterns that people hear and repeat. The article’s effect describes something that is apparently not just shared information, that is deeper.

Those are idioms.

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