Word disorder.

Try this:

She took a green little jug off the shelf.

Why does this sound stupid?

Or this

He held out his lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife to show me proudly.

That is strange, yes, but still good English.

Word order matters to us.

Here is the grammarians' way of doing adjectives: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Get one wrong and the whole things falls apart. Try it for yourself!

Here are some more very strict rules:

How do you like Hop-Hip music? Or the Dong-Ding of a bell?

Vowels like to go in this order: I A O.

Tit for tat, flip flop, bing bang bong.

The first and last words in a sentence are in the strongest position.

Angrily, she turned away.
Out of the door he ran.
Shut the hell up!
Will you stop that child bashing binging and bonging?
Must you do that?

To get the right words in the strongest place, you have to break grammatical rules of word order.

After all, rules you have to break sometimes.

Subject – verb - object.

He – hit – the ball.

The ball he hit flew like a bird.

She said, “Wha'ever.” 

“Wha'ever”, said she.

Alter the word order at your peril – but hey – risks you sometimes have to take!

Anyway, Nice to see you – to see you, nice!

For A Level students only:

This is called, in ancient Greek, “changing over”. (Hyperbaton) Changing the order of words works much better in Greek and Latin though, because they have word endings which show what each word it doing in the sentence; we got rid of our word endings centuries ago.

So we depend on word order.

And with that we must not mess.

Except when…