All our posts here @theEdger are shadowed by the editors after publication, and usually corrected for any grammatical errors. This is one post that requires none, even though the opposite might seem true. There are no grammatical errors here!

On another subject, did you know that Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. I mean, buffaloes from Buffalo that buffaloes from Buffalo buffalo (bully), buffalo other buffaloes from Buffalo. Okay, we all knew that one.

Here’s another one of my favourites: A bicycle cannot stand on its own, it is two tired.

It is not much of a surprise that we are capable of producing an infinite amount of such sentences. It is also not a surprise that we enjoy them so very much. A good chunk of humour comes from the breaking of known patterns. Language is one of those things that is totally rigid in it’s fluidity. Humour arising from sentence structure can take on many forms. It can come through homonymy as in the buffalo buffalo case above, it can come through homophony as in the bicycle case above, it can come through capitonymy, or much lesser so, through polysemes.

Chomsky gave us “colourless green ideas sleep furiously” to show that grammar definitely comes out of the brain, as opposed to the previous belief that it is elucidated by our surroundings. The fancy names mentioned above hardly matter to our brain. Whether we know them or not, we can still enjoy such words. So apparently it is really easy to violate the rules of language, or at least those of a language like English.

But sentences are always more fun than words. Limericks, some poetry, and those dreaded lists the Internet bemoaning the English language all try to make us laugh. Some can leave us captivated for hours. And nothing does this better than garden path sentences. These are those sentences that intentionally try to fool our parsers by usually laying out deceptive function words or words out of context. It always seems like they lack a ‘that’ or a ‘of’, but they don’t, and figuring out how they make sense is the fun part.

Probably the most common one is ‘The horse raced past the barn fell.’ We initially try to parse it as being about a horse that is racing past a barn. But when we reach the ‘fell’, we notice that not only does that word not fall in a verb phrase like it should, but it does not complete any traces either. We have been deceived. Then you read it over and convince yourself that all that’s needed to make sense of the sentence is punctuation. Then you read it over again, and in a flash realize that no commas or periods or connecting words are required. What is actually being said is: The horse (that was) raced past the barn…fell. Fun indeed!

Here are some other good ones, see if you can figure them out if you haven’t done them before.

Throw the cow over the fence some hay.
The cotton clothing is made from grows in Mississippi.
The old man the boat.
They told the boy that the girl met the story.
The tycoon sold the offshore oil tracts for a lot of money wanted to kill JR.

This final one I discovered last night, and not have yet been able to figure out. Help?

The daughter of king’s son admires himself.

EDIT ~ 10 minutes after initial post

k I just figured it out! I’ve striked out the answer so that it’s not easy to read and you can avoid it if you want to figue it out on your own.

The himself is used as a third person masculine reflexive pronoun. The third person is key. The himself refers to the king’s son. You can think of it in the same way someone asks you “How are you?” and you respond “Not so bad, yourself?” That ‘yourself‘ is a third person reflexive, just like the himself in the sentence. This usage probably comes from middle- or olde-English. The usage is now barely alive. Enough to help us generate sneaky gardenpaths I suppose.

Last 5 posts by Abhishek Bhatnagar

• Where is the case for optimism? - December 29th, 2008
• Mutiny on a Chromosome - December 20th, 2008
• Conservation-ing - December 1st, 2008
• The life of a language - November 30th, 2008
• Five animal names that make you giggle - November 16th, 2008

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