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benelliott comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong
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I think it would be because it's a "brown spider" more than a "big spider", i.e. "brown" would be more important/more permanent/more "fundamental" in describing it than "big".
That would explain why you would say a "sad little boy" and "short sad song" ("little boy" and "sad song" being "closer" descriptions of the object in question than if the order was reversed).
I'm not sure that's the full story though (the explanations on grammar we come up with are often wrong ), and don't know the "proper" linguistic explanation.
I think this work. To test it, imagine if there was a specific species of spider called "big spiders" and one of them was brown. I would then consider "brown big spider" to be more appropriate.