Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
In 1972, a grad student at Indiana University, William Rapaport, came up with one of the strangest sentences in the English language: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Would you believe that Prof. Rapaport now teaches at State University of New York…… at Buffalo??? The wiki page has a bunch of similar examples, and Prof. Rapaport’s page has a bunch of background, including evidence that others had discovered the same sentence before 1972. This is a garden path sentence; it can’t be parsed word-by-word without backtracking, making it difficult for NLP algorithms to deal with.
Filed under: all talk, no code · 4 Comments
ouch, that just made my brain hurt.
No one sentence has ever wasted so much of my time. And I’m afraid its not done…
Oh yeah? What about that time powers asked us if we wanted to come over for a game of Samurai Swords? Or that time skaggs called us for tennis, and we ended up spending all day doing the round-up, falling asleep on his floor, going to that computer store with lemmings and free soda on the way, and somehow managing to fit a barbeque in before our making it to the courts and then playing until the sun came up? Hmmm, now I remember I’ve been meaning to make a post about lemmings….