this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Today I learned

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Some owls have skinny long legs (lemm.ee)
submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by lemmylem@lemm.ee to c/todayilearned@lemmy.ml
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[โ€“] MasterNerd@lemm.ee 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You know seeing how you phrased the sentence, I know intuitively that it should be long, skinny legs instead of skinny long legs but I'm not sure why

[โ€“] Theharpyeagle@lemmy.world 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

There's actually a "proper" order of adjectives in English!

https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/In-a-Word/2021/0921/Explaining-the-royal-order-of-adjective-placement

It's not something ever learn directly, but nonetheless we all seem to inherently know it. Why this order? Who knows! It's one of many weird quirks of our language (and some others). It's certainly a hard thing for non-native speakers to pick up on.