gwax's rumblings

There exist won­drous pecu­liar­i­ties to lan­guage, which allow for some truly bizarre lin­guis­tic con­structs. As an indi­vid­ual who gen­er­ally rev­els in con­fu­sion, dis­cord and chaos, in addi­tion to the use of par­en­thet­i­cal clauses and pre­am­bles, I am, of course, thrilled by lin­guis­tic con­structs that either work in spite of seem­ing not to or don’t work in spite of seem­ing to.

In doing a spot of research while writ­ing this par­tic­u­lar post, I hap­pened to dis­cover that wikipedia has a pretty great list of lin­guis­tic exam­ple sen­tences, which I highly rec­om­mend min­ing for enter­tain­ment purposes.

Preamble aside, I have two par­tic­u­lar con­structs that I want to men­tion, one a sen­tence and the other a phrase:

Buffalo buf­falo Buffalo buf­falo buf­falo buf­falo Buffalo buffalo.

That is, that that is is, that that is not is not is that it it is. That is, that that is is that that is not is not. Is that it? It is.

The lat­ter of these two, I men­tion because its use in a recent episode of Rocketboom, which I’ve taken to watch­ing, brought it to my mind. The for­mer, I have known and loved for a while and men­tion because I have not done so in this space prior to now. There are, of course, plenty of other sen­tences that I enjoy for sim­i­lar rea­sons, some involv­ing “had” or “that”, that were excluded for the sake of brevity.

Please feel free to return your seats to their upright posi­tion and your tele­vi­sions to the reg­u­larly sched­uled program.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 5:22 pm and is filed under inanity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.