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ptc24 at 03:44pm on 05/12/2010
ptc24 at 03:44pm on 05/12/2010There's a classic example sentence he has, "Colourless[1] green ideas sleep furiously", which he holds up as an example of grammatical gibberish, and the contrasting "furiously sleep ideas green colourless", which is an example of ungrammatical gibberish. The difference between nonsense and word salad, if you like.
However, I've realised that you can add punctuation, and get "Furiously sleep ideas green, Colourless!", which is grammatical, and you could even imaging a hypothetical scenario for it. That scenario would probably be an MMO, a bit like World of Warcraft. The interpretation goes as follows:
"sleep" has a transitive sense, meaning "to cast a sleep spell on". Once you know this it's obvious that the sentence is an imperative sentence, and everything else falls into place quite quickly. To sleep ideas green is presumably to repeatedly cast the sleep spell on the ideas (presumably mobs called "ideas" - stranger things exist in WoW) until they turn green - after all, you can shout yourself hoarse. Presumably this is best done in a furious manner. And, well, people can have all sorts of bonkers handles in MMOs, so Colourless is not nearly as crazy as some I've seen.
In fact this all feels less strained than coming up with a good scenario for the allegedly more grammatical reverse statement.
[1] This was probably actually "colorless", but whatever...
However, I've realised that you can add punctuation, and get "Furiously sleep ideas green, Colourless!", which is grammatical, and you could even imaging a hypothetical scenario for it. That scenario would probably be an MMO, a bit like World of Warcraft. The interpretation goes as follows:
"sleep" has a transitive sense, meaning "to cast a sleep spell on". Once you know this it's obvious that the sentence is an imperative sentence, and everything else falls into place quite quickly. To sleep ideas green is presumably to repeatedly cast the sleep spell on the ideas (presumably mobs called "ideas" - stranger things exist in WoW) until they turn green - after all, you can shout yourself hoarse. Presumably this is best done in a furious manner. And, well, people can have all sorts of bonkers handles in MMOs, so Colourless is not nearly as crazy as some I've seen.
In fact this all feels less strained than coming up with a good scenario for the allegedly more grammatical reverse statement.
[1] This was probably actually "colorless", but whatever...
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It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
C. M. Street
(no subject)
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Just pronouncing most systematic names needs quite a good knowledge of chemistry. I guess that's working out the morphology, mainly, finding the stems and the prefixes and stuff, that stumps people when pronouncing things like "perfluorooctanoate" that it's hard to understand how people can get wrong when you're used to it.