I wonder what your first thought was on seeing this statement. Did you think, nice sentence, poetic? Or did you think, yes sure I agree, colorless green ideas do sleep furiously. Or did you make the obvious inference, that this sentence is utter, pure and complete nonsense!?
Well whichever way your thought went, I can assure you that you weren't very far off.
The sentence was proposed by Noam Chomsky in his book Syntactic Structures published in 1957. For those unfamiliar with him, Chomsky is a linguist, historian, cognitive scientist, etc. He's currently the Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and laureate professor at the University of Arizona. His works began their job of turning the heads of academics since about 1951 thereabout, and have been hard at work ever since.
In composing the sentence, Chomsky was trying to show that, contrary to popular beliefs at the time, a sentence can be syntactically correct but semantically nonsensical at the same time. Syntax being defined, according to New American Dictionary, as
the arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences in a language.
The emphasis here being well-formed.
Semantics, on the other hand, is simply:
the branch of logic and linguistics concerned with the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences.
It follows then that what Chomsky was trying to prove with this sentence, 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', is that a sentence can be well-formed and well-arranged, following all the accepted phrase structure rules--most of which actually happened to have been proposed by the great Chomsky himself--but still fail to give a coherent and reasonable meaning, i.e, be semantically nonsensical.
Basically this sentence, colorless green ideas sleep furiously, makes sense, in the sense of arrangement and organization, but doesn't actually make sense in the sense of, well, making sense.
But just how nonsensical is the sentence? Or is it even nonsensical? A lot of scholars have tried to give meaning to it in the past, interpreting it by treating it as a figurative expression, where colorless can be assumed to mean, 'boring' 'dull' 'lifeless' and green can mean 'new' 'immature' 'natural' etc.
Furiously also can be interpreted as 'violently', 'energetically'. These new interpretations, then, can be said to give the sentence a new more meaningful substance.
It is interesting to note, however, that in composing the sentence, Chomsky was not even banking on the its meaninglessness, but on the fact that it has most probably never been spoken before, using it then as a counter-example to the idea that the human speech engine was based upon statistical models, such as a Markov chain.
A lot of attempts have been made also to give meaning to the sentence in context, that is, incorporating the sentence meaningfully among other sentences in a comprehensible and comprehensive passage. The best of this, in my opinion, came from C.M Street, in a literary contest organized in 1985 by Stanford University. Street wrote,
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. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
There have been many other examples of these weird, peculiar sentences, composed over the years. An especially interesting one is
Quadruplicity drinks procrastination
composed by Bertrand Russell; although as proven by W.V Quine, this sentence is more false than nonsensical.
Are you feeling like trying out these kind of sentences yourself? Well there's a way you can try it out with friends while having loads of fun at the same time. It's a game called Mad libs. Basically you take one such sentence and start to do some substitution. And who knows, you might even come up with some crazy entendres in the process.
##Colorless green ideas gets upvotes furiously
This is still something even the great Chomsky himself has not verified yet. I guess it's all up to you, then.
Thanks for reading!
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