Grammar Girl here, today's episode concerns what you may have been wondering about topic.

That sure was a mouthful, and it illustrates the problem of stacked modifiers, which

occurs when you string together too many words to describe a noun at the end of the mouthful.

Bill Walsh, author of Lapsing into a comma, calls the problem of stacked modifiers adjective

pile-up, and Microsoft words grammar checker will sometimes put a squiggle under a bunch

of words and complain too many nouns.

Let's look at these related problems and then resolve not to create such a traffic jam

in our sentences.

Modifiers describe or modify other words.

Adjectives modify nouns or pronouns, for example, in adverbs, modify verbs, adjectives or

other adverbs.

You don't run into any problem in single adjective noun combinations, such as illustrated

book, and you can even use one noun to modify another.

It sounds weird, but we do it all the time, in the phrase job description, for example,

the noun job modifies description.

It's also perfectly acceptable to describe a noun with two or three modifiers.

In such cases, you're encouraged to use hyphens to link together words that describe a noun.

If the modifiers appear before the noun, for example, if you want to describe someone's

age as in the 40-year-old man, you need hyphens, 40 hyphen, year hyphen, old man.

When you join up words to describe a noun, you're creating what's called a phrasal adjective.

You can hardly go through a day without using such phrasal adjective combinations as credit

card statement over the countermedicine and long distance phone call.

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