Strange, really, that the best known sentence
Noam Chomsky ever wrote is probably the one which wasn’t supposed to
mean anything. In ‘Syntactic structures’ (1957) he pointed out that
while neither
means
anything, we can easily see that the first is a valid sentence, while the
second is not. Since neither sentence had ever appeared in any text until
then, statistical analysis of language won’t help us tell which of them is
more likely to occur in normal discourse, he said.
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Strictly, the
statistical point appears to be
wrong – we can, in fact, assess the relative
probability of sentences which have never occurred. Be that as it may, the
thing that really caught people’s imagination was the grammatical but
meaningless sentence. Was it really meaningless? Some thought they could
see a kind of poetic meaning in it. Some people at Stanford had a
competition which produced a number of poetic
examples, and there is at least one other
piece of verse.
Resorting to poetry makes thing too easy,
though. A more challenging exercise might be to reinterpret the sentence
as part of a crossword clue…
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Clue: Wow, awful! Colorless green
ideas sleep furiously (3,4,8)
Solution: Gee, dire
paleness.
(‘Furiously’ indicates an anagram of ‘green ideas sleep’, and
the result means (more or less) the same as ‘Wow, awful colorless’.)
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Alright, maybe not the best crossword clue ever.
Without going to those lengths,
we can easily
imagine that the sentence might be part of a political
essay…
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Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was
known that ‘colorless Reds’ – covert Soviet agents – had taken up
places as ‘sleepers’ in the West Ruritanian government. With the
benefit of hindsight, we can see that these agents were in fact
among the government’s most reliable and least politicised
employees. Disruption, direct action, and sabotage were far more
likely to be the work of the extremist ecological factions who also
infiltrated certain government departments. Once securely lodged
inside the state, it seems, Communist ideology waits calmly for its
chance. Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously.
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‘Green’ has so
many relatively normal uses that it lends itself to different
interpretations. The sentence could be about refurbishment of a golf
course, abstract painting, or something new and half-baked. But we’re not
limited to ringing the changes on 'green'. With the right context, we can
make other words - 'idea' for example - mean something
slightly different, too.
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The
Studge advertising agency was desperate to win the Kumfypillo
account. The creative department decided on a ‘rainbow’ workshop. In
these sessions, each person was assigned a color and a corresponding
role. When the box of equipment was opened, however, the green badge
was missing, so Jenkins, the junior member of the team, had to be
green without a color: he also got the hardest job, which was to
come up with new creative angles, a process which at Studge
was called ‘ideaing’.
Imagine the scene; in the new chairs by the window blue and
red are, respectively, critiquing and relating the concept of
repose; at the front of the room yellow
catalogues the properties of head-support, while
standing awkwardly at the back, poor colorless green ideas
sleep
furiously.
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Without wanting to labour the point, one can
imagine an interpretation in which none of the words have their
usual meanings, and all are used in a different grammatical role
from the one you would expect. It's actually a bit of a challenge to hold
that many novel meanings in your mind at once, but...
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‘This is the strangest editorial office I’ve
ever worked in,’ said John, ‘I can’t understand half of what people
say’
‘You
don’t have to be mad to work here, son,’ observed Smith, ‘we can
teach you all that. Let me run you through some of the slang. Now
‘color’ is pictures, so ‘colorless’ means text, or words, as in
‘Mark my colorless, son’. “Green” is for green light, means
"OK", "can do” as in “I green lunch today”. OK so far? Now at one time the boss
had a habit of picking up some piece and saying ‘But what does it
mean ? What are the ideas ?’. So if you want to ask
what somebody means, you can say ‘what ideas there, then?’ Now
"sleep" means, "relax",
"it’s correct". So if someone asks me if I’m going out today,
I can say "hey, sleep", meaning "certainly". One more. When we're in a
desperate hurry to finish, we generally just furiously chuck in
whatever stuff we’ve got. So "furiously" means "whatever you've
got", or "anything", like, if somebody asks me what I’m
drinking and I don’t care, I’ll just say “Oh,
furiously.”.
‘Good grief', exclaimed John, ‘Words can mean
really anything.’
‘That's what I'm saying,’ answered Smith
‘Colorless green ideas sleep
furiously’.
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Gibberish. Alright, I admire
your imagination, or perhaps it would be nearer the mark to say your dull
persistence in wringing out permutations. But so what? Inventing a code in
which each word stands for a completely different one is a futile pursuit,
and tells us nothing about Chomsky.
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I’m not trying
to make a point about Chomsky. What I’m actually doing is suggesting that
Quine was right with his story about ‘gavagai
’ - the word which seemed to mean
'rabbit', but could have meant virtually anything. For any word or set of
words, there really are an infinite number of possible interpretations,
and it follows that the meaning is always impossible to decode with
any certainty.
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Then how does anyone ever
understand anyone else? Quine’s view is one of those theories that even
the author doesn’t believe when it comes to real
life.
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Ah,
but you see, the thing is, we don’t decode words mechanically, the way a
computer would have to do it. We just see what somebody means – it’s a
process of recognition, not calculation. Perhaps that has some
implications for Chomsky after all.
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