Well, Whaddaya Know! Why Have I Never Heard of ....

Flowers galore

... postpositive adjectives!  Like "time immemorial" as opposed to prepositive adjectives like "a green tree."  Adjectives that follow a noun or pronoun as opposed to those that precede it.  Now, I paid attention in English class(es) and even enjoyed parsing sentences, but I don't ever remember hearing about these two kinds of adjectives.  Of course, they are very common, but they are so common, I never gave them a thought.  Even Robert Frost's title, A Road Not Taken, has been cited as an example.

So what's the big deal?  Well, there isn't one, actually.  Other than realizing that if I were ever teaching English as a foreign language (which, yes, I have done), that I wouldn't know how to explain when to use post- and when to use pre- ... and so would then have to tell my poor students something like, "You'll just have to memorize them."  A rather hopeless explanation, I admit. And one I always disliked whenever I was studying another language.

And speaking of other languages, yes, postpositive adjectives are common in some of them such as French, Spanish, Italian to name a few.

As for English, here are a few more:

     whiskey sour
     poet laureate
     Chicken Little
     peach Melba
     Brothers Grimm
     words unspoken
     body politic
     forest primeval

Admittedly, a Bit of Nostalgia

Art Buchwald used to say that television was a hungry medium.  Someone had to keep feeding it.  Someone had to keep coming up with new food.  Or retrieving old food.  Anything, just so long as we were anxious about something.  The mainstream media is there biting at our heels every moment.  Watch me.  See what I have to say.  It used to be that we'd get the news 1) by reading it in the local paper that was delivered each morning on the doorstep, 2) by watching one of those news-reels when we went to the movies, 3) by subscribing to a weekly magazine such as Time or Life.  4) Or, we'd turn on the radio.

I seem to remember more moments when so much was not grabbing for our attention.  Or maybe it was my youth.  We could look across town and study clouds building up on the mountains behind.  We could go down to the wharf and fish off the pier.  Or get out our bicycles and  mosey along the back roads.  And if our parents had any spare time, they could snip old blossoms off the hanging fuchsias or hose off the patio.  We could stop awhile, think about other things, and then come back to anything that might be nagging us.  That way we could come up with our own take on a situation, not abide by what someone else told us whether in a news program or elsewhere.

Did repeated phrases whirl around in our minds?  Straits of Hormuz ... nuclear reactor ... moral imperative ... kicking the can down the road.  We can get so frazzled, so weary, hearing the same thing over and over that we tune out or else we start to believe what we hear.

Do you ever feel as if someone were taking your head between two hands and pressing inward?  Compressing?  Tightening?

Rather like a token on a game board, I've moved a few spaces.  I'm eschewing the "what's going on in the world" and looking instead closer to home.  For one thing, it helps the blood pressure.  I sometimes have the feeling that if we aren't au courant, if we don't bemoan this, that, or t'other, we are considered a head-in-the-sand ostrich.  Actually, my head is now out of the sand, and I'm able to look up and appreciate the day.