At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to reparse it, with "fruit flies" as the subject and "like" as the main verb.
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity.
— Edison B. Schroeder (1966) The verse is popular as a specimen of didactic humor trading on syntactic ambiguity.
Like the poem "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité,[9] its themes are popular among practitioners and students in fields such as natural language processing and linguistics.
[citation needed] The saying is used as a linguistic example of antanaclasis, the stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time.