Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical.
Chomsky wrote in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures: It is fair to assume that neither sentence (1) nor (2) had ever previously occurred in an English discourse.
Green has a wide range of figurative meanings, including "immature", "pertaining to environmental consciousness", "newly formed", and "naive".
In 1958, linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes presented his work to show that nonsense words can develop into something meaningful when in the right sequence.
[8] Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts: While breathless, in stodgy viridian Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
[9] Chao's poem, entitled Making Sense Out of Nonsense: The Story of My Friend Whose "Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously" (after Noam Chomsky) was published in 1971.
As if to prove that the sentences are in fact meaningful, McIntosh wrote two poems influenced by Chomsky's utterance, one of which was entitled Nightmare I.
[11] Tortured my mind's eye at its small peephole sees through the virid glass the endless ghostly oscillographic stream Furiously sleep ideas green colorless Madly awake am I at my small window In 1985, a literary competition was held at Stanford University in which the contestants were invited to make Chomsky's sentence meaningful using not more than 100 words of prose or 14 lines of verse.
[12] An example entry from the competition, by C. M. Street, is: 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.
[13] Research led by Bruno Galantucci at Yeshiva University has implemented the meaningless sentence into real conversations to test reactions.
In the popular game of "Mad Libs", a chosen player asks each other player to provide parts of speech without providing any contextual information (e.g., "Give me a proper noun", or "Give me an adjective"), and these words are inserted into pre-composed sentences with a correct grammatical structure, but in which certain words have been omitted.
There are likely earlier examples of such sentences, possibly from the philosophy of language literature, but not necessarily uncontroversial ones, given that the focus has been mostly on borderline cases.
[19] The philosopher Bertrand Russell used the sentence "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination" in his "An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth" from 1940, to make a similar point;[20] W.V.
Another approach is to create a syntactically-well-formed, easily parsable sentence using nonsense words; a famous such example is "The gostak distims the doshes".
In a sketch about linguistics, British comedy duo Fry and Laurie used the nonsensical sentence "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
