Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
"The child the parents had had had had had no breakfast."
The sentence makes perfect sense with all five "hads" in it. You just have to tease out the context. Can you do it?
(Via Gerund.)
Related Posts (on one page):
A note on our important Editorial Policy.
Or you could buy something for Dean from his WISH LIST!
Celia Farber
Music, Movies, Books, and Etc.
Questioning the HIV/AIDS establishment
|
Dean's World uses and recommends:
Scroogle Search
Your donations also make Dean's World possible.
Or you could buy something for Dean from his WISH LIST!
John while Jane had had had had had had had had had more impact, it would have been used.
--|PW|--
Or, more simply:
{{The child} {{the parents} {had {had {had}}}} {{had {had}} {no breakfast}}}.
{1{2The child}2 {2{3the parents}3 {3had {4had {5had}5}4}3}2}1 1{2{3had {4had}4}3 {3no breakfast}3}2}1.
More simply:
{{The child} {{the parents} {had {had {had}}}}} {{{had {had}} {no breakfast}}}.
({{My mind} {{can't {work}} {{that {many levels}}deep}}}!!!)
{0{1{2The child}2 {2{3the parents}3 {3had {4had {5had}5}4}3}2}1 {1{2{3had {4had}4}3 {3no breakfast}3}2}1}0.
Somethin' like that.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
It's a grammatical sentence. Doing it in writing makes it easier, because capitalizing the fourth word is a big hint.
I wanted to call my Master's thesis 'Colorless Green Ideas Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Past The Barn. Fell.' but my advisor wouldn't go along with it.
Okay, I shouldn't be needlessly obscure for those who didn't take linguistics. In addition to the buffalo example, there are a couple of other sentences that always come up in intro linguistics. One of them is 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', intended to show that a sentence can be syntactically perfectly formed and still incoherent. Another is 'The horse raced past the barn fell', which is an example of a sentence that's syntatically okay but sounds wrong to almost everybody due to what is known as the garden path effect. (If you don't believe it's grammatical, compare it to 'The horse ridden past the barn fell', which is nearly identical, it's just that 'ride' has two forms for past tense and past participle, 'ridden' and 'rode', while 'race' has 'raced' for both.)
So I stuck them all together and for some reason found the result really funny. However, subsequent experience has shown that I am pretty much the only one who thinks so.
{0{1{2The child}2 {2{3the parents}3 {3had {4had {5had}5}4}3}2}1 {1{2had {3had}3}2 {2no breakfast}2}1}0.
Anguished falsetto cry: "Won't somebody please think of the children?!"
The children that the parents had had,
Those children had had no breakfast.
I have had enough of this. I had had enough of this, but then I tried again. I am going to have had enough of this soon.
Hmm...that doesn't help.
The children, the parents had them some time in the past, so they had had them, but now they're somewhere else, and when the new people got the kids the kids were famished because the parents didn't feed them breakfast, so the children the parents had had had had no breakfast. Where does the fifth 'had' come from?
Paul?
The most fun part of this sentence is that you can put a lot more buffalo in there and still have the sentence remain grammatical. For example, "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo" could mean that buffalo that are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, NY in turn buffalo (other) Buffalo that are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, NY. A vicious cycle of buffaloing, to be sure, and four more buffalo than the canonical verison. In fact this page claims you can construct a grammatical sentence using an arbirtrary number of buffalo, even without involving the city.
There's also "Oysters oysters oysters eat eat eat," which is claimed to be grammatical, but English gets really confusing when you try to go beyond two oysters and their gustatory habits.
A child born of a surrogate could be said to have been had by that surrogate. If parents had had a child carried to term, you could say they had had the child had, and the child might thus be referred to as the child the parents had had had.
That gets you up to three "had"s, then it's just that said child had had no breakfast.
Paul: Moe Larry Cheese!
Bill, Ken: Again, the trick is, the couple hired a surrogate mother.
Broken out a bit more: The parents had had a surrogate have a child for them, and that child wound up having had no breakfast that morning.
They had had the child had for them. And that child had had no breakfast.
"The child the parents had had had had had no breakfast."
Well, Dean took the phrase "[which] the parents had had had" to mean, "which the parents had farmed out to a surrogate mother." I, on the other hand, took the third "had" to mean something more like "buffaloed"— as in, "The child which the parents had had buffaloed."
You know, as in "I've been had!" Only in this case, the parents had somehow arranged indirectly for the child to be buffaloed.
So the sentence should be read (more or less) as: "The Buffalo buffalo child which the Buffalo buffalo parents had had buffaloed had had no Buffalo buffalo breakfast."
This is the written equivilent of when I had to learn how to say "When will merry Mary marry?" properly. Being from Texas, those three words all are pronounced the same with my accent. But actually, they're all pronounced differently. Lots of fun.
"The child the parents had had had had had no breakfast--he'd been had."
The children the parents had: had,had,had and had had no breakfast.
I’m pretty sure that’s still correct, but it’s getting damn near silly.
Unless, of course, you’re Porky Pig. Abdat, abdat, abdat, abdat's all folks.
{Dean, {{where {{{do} you} think}} {{I {got}} {the idea {for {those {squiggly braces}}}}}}}?
{{{Back {in {the days}}} {of {DOS,}}} {I {used {to {write}}} {some {{weird shit} programs}}}}.
Dean: The sensation most people have when they get to the end of the sentence "The horse raced past the barn fell" is that they're dealing with a perfectly reasonable sentence, "The horse raced past the barn," and suddenly there's an extra word stuck on the end of it. You have to make it 'buffaloed' instead of 'buffalo' if you want to make it symmetrical with 'raced', and the garden-pathiness of it gets lost anyway because 'the horse buffaloed past the barn' doesn't really make a lot of sense as a standalone - it's not clear there's an intransitive sense of 'buffalo'. So I just kind of stuck the 'fell' on the end to mimic the way most people hear the original trick sentence. Okay, it really makes no sense, it's just the way it seemed silliest to me.
shouldshud re-read:The children the parents had had: had and had
had no breakfast.
Because I am afraid. Very very afriad.
42!
Yeah...that's it...
42!
::head spinning::
Does that mean I had been had?
BK
:)
Of course, I managed to not only entitle a philosophy final paper "Art in a Vacuum", I stuck a comic regarding that topic on the title page ("A. That wasn't a challenge, and B. that's not what she meant.") and received an A in spite of that.