hierarchy of english adjectives

In an essay titled Rules no one teaches but everyone learns, Ruth Walker of the Christian Science Monitor says:

Time, manner, place. Time, manner, place.

That was my mnemonic when, as I high school student, I struggled to learn the rules for ordering German adverbs and adverbial phrases. "I love in summer with you down the Rhein to sail." The time phrase ("in summer") is followed by indicators of manner ("with you") and place" ("down the Rhein").

It seemed utterly wrong. The only way through seemed to be to memorize the rules. Hmph! We don't have rules like this in English – or do we?

It turns out that we do, and that they are much more complex than time, manner, place.

In 1899, when seven-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a short story about a dragon, his mother objected to his phrase "green great dragon." She told him the phrase should be "great green dragon". This gave the young Tolkien a desire to penetrate the mysteries of word order, which led to a lifelong fascination with language.

Today, textbooks for teaching English as a second language explain the entire hierarchy:

• Opinion
  
• Size
  
• Age
  
• Shape
  
• Color
  
• Origin
  
• Material
  
• Purpose
  

Whenever two adjectives are used to modify the same noun, they must appear in the proper order according to the hierarchy, or be separated by commas. A noun will not likely have all eight categories, but the ones it does have must be in the correct order. That's why "green great dragon" sounded wrong to J.R.R. Tolkien's mother. It's why we say "grumpy old man" or "big yellow car" rather than "old grumpy man" or "yellow big car". All native English speakers learn this, but not in the classroom.

That I find this fascinating probably makes me a language nerd. If you've read this far, you're probably a language nerd, too. Welcome to the club.