We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. The order of “fact” versus “opinion” adjectives, however, can’t be altered – opinion comes first.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: Contributors to a global grammar discussion board, for example, argued about whether “a new red oval table” sounds better than “a new oval red table,” even though by OSASCOMP the latter would be correct. The hierarchy is not absolute, and there is some wiggle room among the “fact” categories – size, age, and so on – in the middle. It even went viral in 2016, when a journalist tweeted about “Things native English speakers know, but don’t know we know.” The tweet attached a paragraph by etymologist Mark Forsyth, explaining the adjective order rule and giving an example that uses all the categories according to the OSASCOMP hierarchy: “a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife.” Native speakers are often delighted when they learn about this law and discover how flawlessly they apply it. Teachers of English as a second language encourage students to remember the acronym OSASCOMP. People learning English must memorize what is sometimes called “the royal order of adjectives” – opinion-size-age-shape-color-origin-material-purpose noun – and then make decisions about which adjectives fit into which categories. Or was it a little detective enjoyable novel? No, it was an enjoyable little detective novel! The first two sentences are difficult to understand because they violate a rule that native English speakers grasp intuitively: Multiple adjectives must be placed in a particular order. I just finished reading a detective enjoyable little novel.
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