Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

Last Update: 13 September 2007

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"Sentences (1) and (2) are equally nonsensical, but any speaker of English will recognize that only the former is grammatical.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Furiously sleep ideas green colorless."

Noam Chomsky

Syntactic Structures

Mouton

"Three Models for the Description of Language"

IRE [now, IEEE] Transactions on Information Theory

COILED ALIZARINE

for Noam Chomsky

Curiously deep, the slumber of crimson thoughts:
While breathless, in stodgy viridian,
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The Night Mirror

John Hollander

Gilbert Harman

On Noam Chomsky

YOU, NOAM CHOMSKY

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
in the fan-shaped eyes, that welcomed
only the color of the relevant world,
wearing a face of man,

their green (in violent sleep, the nightmare
day) draining to white or vagueness
in a stretch of fear.

Address yourself, Ideas, to sleep.
Furiously sleep, Ideas, green, colorless,
involved in green, careless of responsibility.

Let all fury, entangled with your grammar,
be a colorless green.

Sister Mary Jonathan, O.P.

(Sister Jonathan teaches senior English at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin.)

College English

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