Dear G:
You wrote:
Dunno, but back as a kid in Virginia, we were taught that a sentence such as “The former overweight woman told us how she lost fifty-five pounds” (the example you use for culmulative adjectives) should always be written using an adverb (as in: “The formerly overweight woman told us how she lost fifty-five pounds”) as adverbs modify adjectives. Is that rule gone with the wind or since when do we no longer use “ly” adverbs to modify adjectives?
Both ways are technically correct. The way you propose actually solves a lot of the cumulative adjective problems. In your case, clearly “formerly” is an adverb modifying “overweight.” In our example “former” is a cumulative adjective modifying “overweight woman.” Both are standard English, but we wanted to illustrate the cumulative adjectives in our example–with maybe a touch of humor.
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Perhaps the biggest comma crime is the misunderstanding that a comma MUST be used in ALL scenarios of a certain form, regardless of context. The comma, first and foremost, should serve readability and clarity or else is an encumbrance:
No one needs a comma to describe the “big old black bull”–not because of adverbs, cumulative adjectives or any other such nonsense, but that to interrupt the alliteration with commas destroys the beauty of such a phrase…composed of monosyllables; alliterative, idiomatic and concise… Unless a hair-splitting scenario is imagined wherein one must differentiate between big vs small, old vs young, black vs spotted vs rattan bulls is paramount, no reader is likely to be confounded by this elegant description sans commas.
And if you’re a diagrammatic grammarian, they are all “coordinate” adjectives. “Big, old, black bull…” with commas is just a stinking read. Ain’t no difference between “big old black bull” and “old big black bull”; unless there is.