Colorless Green Thoughts

Thursday September 11, 2003 @ 10:24 AM (UTC)

I don’t know who originated the phrase, but Keith Devlin used it in a Science, Technology, and Society lecture to show how a grammatically correct sentence (that a computer could tell was correct) was different from a meaningful sentence (a computer wouldn’t be able to tell). The phrase was:

Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously

Mr. Devlin noted that it is in fact so meaningless that each pairing of juxtaposed words within it is nonsense. To me, high-schooler and not-yet-English-major that I was, it did seem to have meaning - more than one, even. A person has thoughts, perhaps, which he has ground over in his mind so often that they are faded, or no longer have the emotional punch they once did. Perhaps these thoughts are of forests, or gardens, or a fertile homeland. He is tired of these thoughts, so he tries to suppress them. As suppressed thoughts do, they stay down, but only with an anxious effort, like holding a muscle in an awkward position - determined and intense. Colorless green thoughts sleep furiously.

At any rate, the idea intrigues me. Complete, grammatically correct sentences where each couple of words is literally nonsensical (not figuratively.) It sounds fun.

My first attempt:

Rhetorical anvils discourse moistly.

Comments

Funny. When you read it, you saw deep inner meaning. When I read it, I thought, “Well, that sentence obviously doesn’t make any sense. I’ll ignore it and move on.”

Reminds me of an old old poem that everyone’s grandfather tells them, in some form or another:

One bright day in the middle of the night
Two dead boys went out to fight
The turned their backs and faced each other
Drew their swords and shot each other
A deaf policeman heard the noise
And came and killed those two dead boys
If you don’t believe this lie is true
Ask the blind man, he saw it too

Amon Tobin: Supermodified – Keepin’ It Steel

I rest my case.

Well, actually, I saw the premise that it had no meaning as a challenge, and THEREFORE read in deep inner meaning.

And neither of my grampas ever told me that.

Sincerely,
Lil Miss Contrary

And the son of the sun-disc, or I could be misinterpreting.

Found a place where you can actually listen to the first 30 seconds of the track.

A moist, dripping sound of discoursing anvils that are only concerned with mere style and effect – rhetorical – since, judging by the sound, no red-hot iron is actually forged.

That quote is from Noam Chomsky, the guy who pretty much invented modern linguistics. He designed the sentence to illustrate the difference between syntactic and semantic sense. Syntacticly, the sentence is perfect. But it makes no sense symantically.

See? I could have looked that up, but isn’t it more fun to tell me? :p

New comment

required, won't be displayed (but may be used for Gravatar)

optional

Don't type anything here unless you're an evil robot:


And especially don't type anything here:

Basic HTML (including links) is allowed, just don't try anything fishy. Your comment will be auto-formatted unless you use your own <p> tags for formatting. You're also welcome to use Textile.

Copyright © 2017 Felicity Shoulders. All rights reserved.
Powered by Thoth.