Adventures with adjectives. Wheeeee... · 1:42pm Feb 17th, 2019
Squeezing together the fuzzy brown caterpillars above her tiny green glaring eyes.
This simple sentence gave me so much trouble in The Woman! It felt right, but also wrong somehow; should there be commas wedged into those lists of adjectives? Or not? I wasn't sure. So I turned to The Only Grammar Book You'll Ever Need and the internet for help.
It's a question of if they are "compound" or "coordinate" adjectives.
The book wasn't helpful and Grammar Girl's website said that, "Coordinate adjectives are adjectives that each separately modify the noun that follows. [...] Cumulative adjectives, on the other hand, don’t separately modify the noun that follows even though they are all stacked up before the noun."
Okay, well, "fuzzy" and "brown" can both separately modify "caterpillars". "Fuzzy" certainly doesn't modify "brown"... at least I've never heard of something that's "fuzzy brown" coloured.
"Tiny", "green", and "glaring" can separately modify "eyes". So... They're all coordinate adjectives then?
Grammar Girl suggested that "You can rearrange coordinate adjectives, and you can stick an 'and' between them. As for cumulative adjectives, neither trick works."
Squeezing together the brown fuzzy caterpillars above her glaring green tiny eyes.
Squeezing together the fuzzy and brown caterpillars above her tiny and green and glaring eyes.
Seems a bit awkward, but it does work... aside from "glaring" possibly describing a shade of "green" rather than that Mayree is glaring at Mainstay. I guessed that meant they must coordinate adjectives and the rule for those is that you must separate them with commas or "and".
Squeezing together the fuzzy and brown caterpillars above her tiny, green, and glaring eyes.
Nope. I don't like it. Slows down parsing and shoves in filler words. Blegh.
I chatted with Cross Lament about it and neither of us found Grammar Girl's advice very helpful in sorting it out. I'd pretty much given up and decided to go with...
Squeezing together the fuzzy, brown caterpillars above her tiny green glaring eyes.
...because it vaguely followed the "rules" and didn't make my skin crawl.
Then Cross found this article https://facweb.northseattle.edu/ljensen/ESL_042/Grammar-Clauses%20&%20Parts%20of%20Speech/Adjectives-%20CoordinateOrCumulative.rtf
"An adjective is “coordinate” when it is used in a pair or series with other adjectives within its own descriptive category to describe the same noun." "An adjective is “cumulative” when it occurs in a pair or series with other adjectives of different descriptive categories, the adjectives building upon each other and together modifying the noun." [Underlines added by me.]
Okay, that makes a LOT more sense!
"Fuzzy" describes texture. "Brown" describes colour. Cumulative.
"Tiny" describes size. "Green" describes colour. "Glaring" describes behaviour. Also cumulative.
After an hour of trying to sort things out I ended up with...
Squeezing together the fuzzy brown caterpillars above her tiny green glaring eyes.
...back where I started. 
But at least I now know that it's correct. (I hope.) 
