"Stewart Hunting Ancient" or "Ancient Hunting Stewart"? The grammar Nazi weighs in...

[OC Richard]

Court Martial
Attorney General
Sergeant Major

None of these, of course, are English, but borrowed from French.

In any case, here's an example of the same words appearing in just about every order

Stewart Muted Blue
Stewart Blue Muted
Muted Blue Stewart

in the various Ebay listings of this lovely tartan

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Luxurious-Ca...item4ac5b27616

It's very complex with a tartan like this. It's obviously a variant of Royal Stewart. It seems to be a palette variant of "Dress Stewart" which in turn is a palette variant of Royal Stewart.

I might call it Royal Stewart White Muted due to the white ground. Royal Stewart Blue indicates a blue ground to me, what people call MacBeth.

[OC Richard]

And yet it's Fire Department New York (FDNY).

It gets very strange with Government agencies, does it not?

Here in California everyone refers to the DMV, which, one might think, refers to something like the Department of Motor Vehicles.

But in the several phone books I have about you would look in vain under "D" for it! For no such thing appears.

Rather you must look under "M" because it appears in these phone books as the Motor Vehicle Department.

[adempsey10]

There is grammtically correct and then there is codified naming practices.

My guess is that there is a naming system for tartans, in which a method for naming has been established and this is why it gets labelled as Stewart Hunting Ancient. Somewhere someone has said that "Tartan name, then type then colour scheme" or something to that effect. In this case, grammatical correctness doesn't matter. Dont think of them as adjectives (modifiers) but rather as identifiers.

Stewart identifies the Family of tartan patterns (i.e. the Stewart, Macdonald, Douglas)
Hunting identifies the specific type of pattern within the family (i.e. hunting, dress)
Ancient identifies the colour scheme of the tartan. (i.e. ancient, weathered, modern)

Something like that.

[adempsey10]

And yet it's Fire Department New York (FDNY).

This makes sense though. Fire Department OF New York. It is standard that prepositions are not part of the acronym.

HCM - Honda OF Canada Manufacturing
CDC - Centre FOR Disease Control
UWO - University OF Western Ontario
USA - United States OF America

If the preposition is included, it's usually the whole word.

UofT - University of Toronto
UofO - University of Ottawa

[Barb T]

You could talk about birds in the same way using main names and "identifiers", as you put it. But when you use the name in a sentence, you wouldn't put the identifier second. For example, "sparrow" is the main name for a type of bird. There are a variety of types of sparrows, and an additional word is used as an "identifier", as you put it, for the particular type of sparrow. But you would never put the identifier after the main name "sparrow" - it always goes before (e.g., chipping sparrow, not sparrow chipping; song sparrow, not sparrow song). It's really no different for Dress Ferguson, which makes a lot more sense than Ferguson Dress (which is akin to sparrow chipping).

[Carlo]

Is this turning into another of these "white hose" topics

We could talk about Schwingen where names are used with the family name before the first name:
Not John MacDonald
but MacDonald John.
There is a rule for every exception.

By the way this is a good example why we should not use wikipedia without a second opinion. They have the names the wrong way round in the english version.

[BBNC]

Gee, I leave the forum for a few days, come back, and what do I find? Word usage is still being batted about. I had no idea this was such a hot-button topic. IMHO, it matters not as long as the meaning gets across. We all know what we're talking about when describing any particular tartan.

[Kilted Cole]

Court Martial
Attorney General
Sergeant Major

I'm all out of "aye's" so here is a (+ 1)

[Oldhiker]

If you're using it in a sentence, the adjectives should come first!

Yes in English I believe that would be proper, in Gaelic the adjective follows the noun.