20 May 2014

Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

I thought I should perhaps explain my URL to all the non-linguistists out there (not that I am exactly one myself. My teacher introduced it to me).
Noam Chomsky, linguist and founder of the Nativist Approach to how we acquire language came up with this sentence.
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
What he wanted to show with it was our innate ability to use grammar and the 'deep structure' every language has. Semantically, the sentence makes no sense at all - how can something be green and colourless at the same time? Or sleep furiously? How can an idea sleep at all? But gramatically, the sentence makes perfect sense (and even contains all the major word classes noun, verb, adjective and adverb). So there.

I admit it is a bit pompous and cumbersome as an URL and that there is an 'u' missing in 'furiously', but all other good domains were already taken (even this one with the 'u' in!).
Plus, I felt awfully clever and educated.

EDIT: Obviously, I've changed it now, the missing 'u' bothered me too much.

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