I saw a delightful talk this week by Gary Marcus, giving examples from his book Kluge, the haphazard construction of the human mind. In this particular talk he highlighted various quirks and ambiguities in natural language.
For example, he pointed out that even seemingly simple sentences can be difficult for people to parse, if those sentences don’t conform to the way people think. My favorite of his examples along these lines was: “People people left left.”
That wonderful sentence is only four words long (sentences don’t get much shorter than that), and follows the standard rules of grammar, yet seems incomprehensible to many quite intelligent people. Although it’s grammatically correct, it doesn’t correspond to the way people think. In case you’re having trouble understanding what the sentence means, I’ll describe it more completely in a few days.
Some the many other fun examples he gave included inherently ambiguous sentences such as: “The spy shot the policeman with the revolver”, and “Put the cup on the towel on the table.” For each of these sentences there are two perfectly plausible yet entirely distinct meanings.
These ambiguous sentences got me thinking. Might it be possible to write an entire story — perhaps a novel — in which the meaning of every sentence was similarly ambiguous? I’m sure it would be very difficult (and maybe you’d have to be a little crazy to try). But such a novel would be a fascinating thing to read. One possible first sentence is the title of this post.