Nonsense
Apr. 28th, 2010 | 05:30 pm
From:: pamplemousse
- How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg. (Abe Lincoln)
+ Wikipedia: Literary nonsense
The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction (for a start, how can a green idea be colorless?) and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle.
+ Wikipedia: Literary nonsense
The phrase "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" was coined by Noam Chomsky as an example of nonsense. The individual words make sense and are arranged according to proper grammatical rules, yet the result is nonsense. The inspiration for this attempt at creating verbal nonsense came from the idea of contradiction (for a start, how can a green idea be colorless?) and seemingly irrelevant and/or incompatible characteristics, which conspire to make the phrase meaningless. The phrase "the square root of Tuesday" operates on the latter principle.