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
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