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MarcTheEngineer 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.
Marius makes a good point with the chameleon - Although when describing something as skinny/fat the color comes first (Red Faced Fat Man vs. Large/Huge Red-faced man)
Almost seems to me that we place words that categorize the object closest to the object - Brown Spider/Green Chameleon/Fat Man are all categories of those objects whereas a Big spider isn't as much of a category as it describes the size of the spider relative to other spiders in the same category.