Friday, September 07, 2007

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo

Kerry was feeling mean, so he sent me to the wikipedia page explaining the gramatically correct sentence "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo". I had to read it until I understood it, and sounded like an insane man while explaining it to another coworker, as we both said Buffalo far more times than a reasonable person should in a year. "Indeed, for any n ≥ 1, the sentence 'buffalo' is grammatically correct," so we could still be saying it and our sentence would still be describing the brusque nature of upstate New York bison to each other.

2 comments:

Maren said...

Oh, man. That's one of those things that looks absolutely impossible before reading the explaination, then totally obvious afterwards. I think it's tricky because we hardly use the verb form, and there's not punctuation or articles to help out. That's a funny mental video- you trying to explain it to a co-worker.

Geary said...

OK, I finally got it. I'm a little slow about these things.