Frozen Binomials: Why Do We Cringe at 'Pepper and Salt'?

Can you put the pepper and salt on the table? 

Will you stop walking forth and back; you’re going to wear out the carpet. 

I just have to tie up a few ends and odds before I quit for the day.

How many uncles and aunts do you have?

Did you just cringe hearing those backward sets of words as much as I did saying them? It’s an odd, but well-known thing in English — and other languages — that some word pairs, like “sticks and stones,” just sound more “right” when we say them in a certain order. 

Linguists call word pairs like this “binomials,” and if the words appear in the same order most of the time, they’re called “frozen binomials.” If words are a jumble of dancers we negotiate into phrases and sentences, imagine frozen binomials as a pair of dancers frozen in place like statues.

I occasionally get questions from thoughtful listeners who have noticed this phenomenon and wondered why it happens. For example, Curt recently asked on Facebook why we say “guys and dolls” or “guys and gals” instead of “dolls and guys” or “gals and guys.” 

One theory he had was that maybe we tend to put men before women in such pairs, and he’s definitely on to something!

When I started looking into the question, it kind of blew my mind how many researchers have tried to answer it. Linguists have been testing possibilities for at least 60 years, though one paper I read says you can find people looking into binomials as far back as the ancient Sanskrit philologist Panini, who is sometimes called the father of linguistics.

Researchers have come up with about 20 theories about what determines word order, and those can be consolidated into just a few categories. (And I’ll add that these are all tendencies and not hard-and-fast rules. You’ll probably be able to think of an exception to every reason I name.) 

Powerful words go first

The tendency to put men before women, as in “kings and queens,” “brothers and sisters,” and “guys and gals,” falls under the broader category of putting powerful or more important things first (or things that are culturally perceived as powerful or more important first). 

One study I just can’t get out of my head was done in 2011 by Peter Hegarty and colleagues at the University of Surrey, and it showed that not only did people put the man’s name first in the names of imaginary couples, but when...

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