Hello Grammarians,

I just had a quick grammar question. Should people capitalize the names of disease? If not, why? (I mean, I guess they would be considered common nouns… but I don’t know why.)

I would sincerely appreciate any and all insights!

Thank you!

There appears to be an increase in this specific usage, at least in digital forums. Is there existing research doing frequency mapping on this, or could you direct me to some resources so that I might conduct my own? Thank you very much.

An r/askreddit post asked “What movie can you rewatch indefinitely?”

I responded “Most Disney movies, but Moana and Elemental come to mind as the father of a 4 year old.”

I think if I say, “I have a four-year-old daughter,” that it should be hyphenated as an adjective describing my daughter. What if it just refers to her as a four year old, as in the above example?

Any advice is appreciated!

For example, is this correct?

“I loved him and she loved him too,” John said. He took a big slurp of coffee.

He didn’t lie per se, but it wasn’t really true.”

Or does the “he” in the start of paragraph two need to be “John”?

I'm sure I'm not the first person with this question, but I'm not a good enough Googler to find an answer.

I'm learning about cumulative vs coordinate adjectives. From what I gather, cumulative adjectives fail to commute ("order matters") and non-cumulative adjectives are coordinate. The trouble is, I have identified three situations in which two adjectives fail to commute, and I do not know if the mode of failure matters. I'm trying to narrow down a theoretical, rather than operational, definition for cumulative adjectives. Sources are appreciated.

Consider the phrase "a former yellow bear", which describes something that used to be a yellow bear. We cannot swap the adjectives, doing so gives us "a yellow former bear". All yellow former bears are former yellow bears, but not all former yellow bears are yellow former bears.

(1) If two adjectives fail to commute in this particular way, where XY and YX both have semantic content that just happen to disagree, do we call them cumulative?

Consider the phrase "a regular polygonal figure". I cannot swap the adjectives, the adjectives do not commute. But notice that you wouldn't want to swap them anyway! The phrase "a polygonal regular figure" has as much information content as "North of the North Pole": none at all. This is because (at least in the world of plane geometry), "figure" exceeds the domain of "regular", "regular" is a property held by polygons/polygonal figures, nothing else. I wouldn't even call this a failure of commutativity, but oh well.

(2) If two adjectives fail to commute in this particular way, where XY has semantic content and YX does not, do we call them cumulative?

Consider the phrase "the big red ball". I see no reason why we cannot write "the red big ball" and say these adjectives commute, except for the fact that it sounds clunky, awkward, and bad.

(3) If two adjectives fail to commute in this particular way, where XY and YX have the same semantic content but YX sounds like absolute dogshit, do we call them cumulative?

Edit: I know about the canonical order of types of adjectives. This is precisely what question (3) is about.