2124: Order of Adjectives: Green New Deal Oct 8, 2020

Without getting into politics, one can say that the 'Green New Deal' sounds odd; indeed, it would violate the order of adjectives that all native English speakers will know, whereby qualities precede colors. Of course, this is supposed to reference the original "New Deal", and so the fact that that phrase as a whole is being modified only coincidentally has an adjective at the beginning of it. Indeed, the person who is sometimes attributed for at least aiding in popularizing the term, Thomas Friedman, wrote "[b]ut we will only green the world when we change the very nature of the electricity grid", using 'green' as a verb, so he clearly wasn't averse to using adjectives in strange ways there as well.

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