"The great late Alphonse Capone"
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Donald Trump's recent West Point commencement address has gotten plenty of media coverage. But what I noticed was something linguistic, which the commentariat unsurprisingly ignored, namely a violation of expected modifier order (in a passage around 45:46 in the cited recording):
I went through a very tough time with some very
radicalized sick people
and I say I was investigated more than the great
late Alphonse Capone. Alphonse Capone was a monster
he was a very hardened criminal
I went through more investigations than Alphonse Capone
and now I'm talking to you as president can you believe this
can you believe it
The order of modifiers in "the great late Alphonse Capone" violated my word-order expectations. Trump's 700-msec pauses after "great" and "late" indicate that this was probably a matter of compositional processing rather than grammatical preference. But still, it made me wonder whether my preferences are valid in this case — and if so, what explains them.
A quick check of Mark Davies' NOW corpus confirms that (raw and superficial) usage counts agree with me: 4,320 instances of "late great" versus 416 instances of "great late". And in fact the corpus evidence is stronger than that, since a large fraction of the "great late" examples are things like these:
McGowan's of Phibsborough throws a great late night party.
This is great late 1960s 007 balladry.
It is a great late summer addition to your garden.
So why the judgment that late should precede great in "the late great Al Capone"?
Of course, this is just a specific instance of a much larger problem. "Big bad modifier order" (9/4/2016) lists a number of attempts at a general explanation, including Mark Forsyth's exploration of Hyperbaton:
[A]djectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.
For a more recent (and open-access) review, see Gregory Scontras, "Adjective ordering across languages." Annual Review of Linguistics 2023 — and the articles that Google Scholar lists as citing it, including vibe-aware things like Richard Futrell and Kyle Mahowald's "How Linguistics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Language Models".
But I haven't found any direct discussion of "late great" vs. "great late", nor any generalization that obviously applies — though some readers will likely be able to do better.
And there are some hints that other dimensions produce different preferences, for example by substituting "recently-deceased" for "late".
There's also the question of generalization across languages. What about French "le regretté grand X" vs. "le grand regretté X", or Spanish "el fallecido gran X" vs. "el gran fallecido X", or the equivalent choices in Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Hindi, etc.?
C Baker said,
May 26, 2025 @ 7:34 am
I'm more struck by the weirdness of calling him anything other than Al Capone.
.mau. said,
May 26, 2025 @ 7:50 am
In Italian I would surely say "Il grande fu Al Capone", because "il fu grande Al Capone" seems to imply that he was great and now he isn't. If I use "defunto" or "compianto" instead of "fu", however, I would use "Il defunto/compianto grande Al Capone". I am not able to pinpoint any specific rule, however.
Mark Liberman said,
May 26, 2025 @ 7:54 am
@C Baker: "I'm more struck by the weirdness of calling him anything other than Al Capone."
I was also struck by that. And we're both in tune with the textual universe: the NOW corpus has 4452 instances of Al Capone, vs. 32 of Alphonse Capone.
But I don't think there's much of a scholarly literature on the question of why one form or another of a name is preferred, issues of transliteration and orthographic history aside… The question presumably belongs to the sociologists and historians, anyhow, not to the linguists.
Jonathan Lundell said,
May 26, 2025 @ 8:15 am
Forsyth’s suggests that “great” (opinion) ought to come first, with the caveat that “late” doesn’t really fit into any of his remaining categories (age?). Also, “the late, great X” has a kind of idiomatic status.
Tangentially, leaving out the odd word order and odd “Alphonse”, “the great Al Capone” is an odd characterization on its own.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 26, 2025 @ 8:47 am
A separate inquiry where corpus data might be useful is when "late" is and isn't used to refer to someone who is no longer alive. It seems on Gricean-type principles to be most likely to be used when the person is sufficiently recently deceased that the fact that they're no longer alive is somehow salient, even if not expected to be new information to the addressee. It would sound odd to refer to "the late William Shakespeare," for example. One could in principle test this with a number of famous people to see if the rate at which "late" appears in connection with their names declines steadily decade-by-decade after their demise and if so what the slope typically looks like and when it approaches the x-axis. I suppose it might also vary with the age of the speaker – Al Capone died the year after Pres. Trump was born so Trump could have as a boy heard him referred to as a recently-deceased celebrity whereas by the time I was a boy Capone already belonged to the distant past when things had still been black-and-white rather than in full color. Having personally first become aware of the celebrity when they were recently-deceased might end up being a "sticky" fact that remained salient in the mind of a given speaker even as the decades passed.
Whether "late great" follows the same pattern (if there indeed turns out to be a pattern) as bare "late" would be a separate empirical question to investigate. FWIW I agree "late great" is an idiomatic fixed phrase rather than evidence of people assembling the two adjectives each time in a nonce way that's influenced by some general adjective-ordering rule.
John Swindle said,
May 26, 2025 @ 9:06 am
Maybe he started to say "the great …" and then remembered that he wanted to add "late."
I knew someone, American of Austrian origin, who reported listening to Adolf Hitler when he was in power and thinking that if he didn't know better he'd be impressed. It's theoretically possibly, even likely on the evidence, that some people can listen to this new guy without revulsion.
Jerry Packard said,
May 26, 2025 @ 9:09 am
As a first toss I would speculate that in producing two consecutive -ate rhymes it is easier to produce one with a simple l- onset followed by one with the complex consonant cluster onset gr- than vice-versa, because the easy followed by hard gives an advantage in producing the hard. This is a testable hypothesis both in speech production and corpus analysis
C Baker said,
May 26, 2025 @ 9:16 am
Tangentially, leaving out the odd word order and odd “Alphonse”, “the great Al Capone” is an odd characterization on its own.
Yeah, it's just weirdness all the way down.
Andreas Johansson said,
May 26, 2025 @ 9:46 am
I don't think I even knew that "Al" was short for "Alphonse".
Yves Rehbein said,
May 26, 2025 @ 10:07 am
Plausible deniability: did he really just say that, he clearly misspoke? It is quite "odd", as per @Jonathn Lindell, but literally, what are the chances?!
You don't think he writes his own speeches do you?
Rob Helmerichs said,
May 26, 2025 @ 10:46 am
He doesn't write his speeches, but he often goes off-script, especially (as in this case) to express personal grievances.
Jay Sekora said,
May 26, 2025 @ 11:26 am
I also feel like “some very radicalized sick people” rubs me the wrong way, and I’d expect “some very sick radicalized people” or “some very sick, radicalized people”, maybe for the reason Jerry Packard suggests above, that “sick” and “radicalized” are the same semantic category of adjective but it sounds more natural for the shorter, more common one to come first. But Trump seems to have some stock phrases like “sick people” that he doesn’t like breaking up.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 26, 2025 @ 11:29 am
Re Alphonse, there's definitely a phenomenon of deliberately referring to well-known people universally known by a nickname by their "proper" full first name, to take advantage of the fact that the full formal name sounds marked in some way. Sometimes but perhaps not always this is done for semi-jocular purposes (because it may seem comically incongruous). This seems like the sort of usage there might be a literature on?
Michael GilbertKoplow said,
May 26, 2025 @ 11:56 am
So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.
I've read this before. As a nonlinguist, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I don't buy it. This stuff isn't carved in stone, and it makes no allowance for context. This example treats "whittling" as just one adj among several. I think it would be more correct to say that "whittling knife" is a noun. It also makes no allowance for (you should forgive the expresh) individuality.
MattF said,
May 26, 2025 @ 11:56 am
So, which is bigger— a big fucking truck or a fucking big truck?
Jerry Packard said,
May 26, 2025 @ 12:26 pm
“So, which is bigger— a big fucking truck or a fucking big truck?”
In ‘big, fucking’, both adjectives modify the noun, while in ‘fucking big’, the first adjective modifies the second. So I’d guess ‘fucking big’ is bigger.
Chester Draws said,
May 26, 2025 @ 3:00 pm
"the great Al Capone" isn't that weird. "Great" refers to their effect, not their probity.
Catherine "the Great" of Russia was a monster, who did in her husband and eagerly took part in the partition of Poland.
If someone called Napoleon "great" I wouldn't consider it odd, despite his butchering his way across Europe multiple times.
Mark Liberman said,
May 26, 2025 @ 3:35 pm
@Michael GilbertKoplow: "As a nonlinguist, I may not know what I'm talking about, but I don't buy it."
You're as entitled as anyone else to an opinion about the triggers and symptoms of textual insanity. And in any case, the author of the unbought quote, Mark Forsyth, is a journalist rather than a linguist.
Coby said,
May 26, 2025 @ 3:45 pm
Trump referred to Hannibal Lector as "late great", so he doesn't seem to be consistent in this matter.
Jacob Stewart said,
May 26, 2025 @ 6:33 pm
Maybe he was trying to see if he could add a new Trumpism to the language.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 26, 2025 @ 7:33 pm
The google books ngram viewer shows the string "late great" fairly stable in frequency of usage over the almost 80 years since Trump's birth. But the corpus only has four hits for "late great Al Capone," which would not be enough to really generalize from even if you didn't have the problem that two of them can't be read in context due to the limitations of snippet view etc. So we only need five future books on the Trump presidency using "great late Alphonse Capone" to illustrate his idiosyncratic way of speaking for that to become the majority usage.
Phillip Helbig said,
May 27, 2025 @ 12:59 am
Taking the last point first, it can be different in other languages. For example, in French by default the adjective is after the noun, except for a few common adjectives. In some cases, it changes the meaning, with after the noun being the literal meaning and before the noun a metaphorical one. For example, “ancien” means “ancient” if after the noun, but means “former, ex-“ if before the noun.
I think Tolkein once commented on why it’s a great green dragon and not a green great dragon. Another thing which is as hard and fast a rule as any but which most people aren’t aware of involves two-word adjectives. If the noun which is part of the two-word adjective has a regular plural, then use the singular, but use the plural if irregular. Thus, a “rat-infested barn” vs. a “mice-infested barn”. I first came across that in a book by Steven Pinker, but I don’t remember his explanation (if there was one).
Arthur Baker said,
May 27, 2025 @ 1:48 am
I'm an English-born Australian, and I have a question: why, in US English, is it called a commencement speech when its main purpose is to farewell students at the END of their studies?
JPL said,
May 27, 2025 @ 1:55 am
The basic expression in the usual contexts is "the late X"; "late great" is the afterthought cleverly using a word that rhymes with "late". But Trump's first thought here was probably praise rather than lament.
There are so many other serious problems with Trump's language usage, e.g., his use of pronouns in the avoidance of using full noun phrases to describe intended referents in the world, probably, I would say, because he is now pretty much incapable of providing those full NPs in the context of a sentence. The result is that interviewers and press inquirers always should ask (but usually don't) "what are you talking about?" Instead they fill in the gaps for him. Almost any interview will contain examples of this. It all sadly contributes to the sanewashing.
Keith said,
May 27, 2025 @ 2:07 am
@Phillip Helbig "If the noun which is part of the two-word adjective has a regular plural, then use the singular, but use the plural if irregular. Thus, a “rat-infested barn” vs. a “mice-infested barn”. I first came across that in a book by Steven Pinker, but I don’t remember his explanation (if there was one)."
I seem to remember an example from Pinker comparing "rat-eater" with "mice-eater". This, to my native (British) English speaker's ears, sounds abominable. I don't remember Pinker trying to formulate a rule to explain this, but it's been donkey's years since I last read it.
ajay said,
May 27, 2025 @ 5:11 am
"If the noun which is part of the two-word adjective has a regular plural, then use the singular, but use the plural if irregular.
I'm also not sure about "mice-infested". I would say "mouse-infested". Let's think of some other examples.
What things have irregular plurals (by which we mean not just some form of adding "-s")? Geese. Feet. Children. Teeth. Oxen.
And yet, child-safe medicine bottle. Ox-drawn cart (even if there's more than one ox drawing it). Goose-feather bed. Fine-tooth comb. If you talked about a geese-feather bed I would think you were nuts, or foreign, or both.
ajay said,
May 27, 2025 @ 5:13 am
In fact I have a vague memory of a joke (possibly Pratchett) about a barn or something being mouse-infested and a footnote explaining that there was only one mouse but it was really obnoxious.
JimG said,
May 27, 2025 @ 7:43 am
@Arthur Baker : Google's AI says it well:
" . . . The term "commencement" itself signifies the beginning of a new chapter or phase, marking the start of a graduate's career or future endeavors."
Jerry Packard said,
May 27, 2025 @ 1:54 pm
I remember having the same reaction when I encountered the word for graduation in Chinese: 毕业 bi4ye4 lit. ‘end career’; when we graduate, aren’t we just beginning our career?