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Quizilla, laziness, ascii characters and Spanish word order... all in one post

I think I'll stop blogging on matters substantive and just do about five Quizilla quizzes a day. You'll still love me, right?

schizotypal


Which Personality Disorder Do You Have?
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<pedant>The text says I may "loose" my grip on reality altogether. Is the lose/loose distinction so difficult for people to grasp? Arrgh. Actually it sort of works in this context, but it still jars.</pedant>

Oh, and by the way did you notice my lovely angle quotes? Google is my friend; I found this lovely site which gives you the ascii codes for characters like &amp;, the ampersand; &lt;, the left bracket and &gt;, the right bracket. Because it's so nice (and somewhat lazy, yes) to be able to explicitly set the tone of your writing (as "pedant", above), since

mood this interferes with parsing of a sentence /mood

and

(this) looks dumb (/this).

Question: why does "matters substantive" sound better (more elegant, possibly more ironic) than "substantive matters"? Is there a rule allowing post-nounal adjectives under certain conditions in English or have I just studied Spanish too long (most Spanish adjectives follow the noun, as in "casa blanca" but some go before, like "buenos dias". I've internalized the rule, I guess, since I can't tell you why they're different.)

Posted by Tim at August 28, 2003 12:54 AM