What comes after 15? 15, of course.
We love our local Thai restaurant, but they might want to consider hiring a menu designer who can count higher than 15.
A friend of mine wrote the other day the following:
We all know that that so isn’t how it works.
It amused me, but also seemed to be (as far as I can tell) grammatically fine. It led to the response:
I’m glad that that that that amused you.
Even better.
I came across this article the other day on Mental Floss. It has some further examples of grammatical weirdness:
And of course my favorite:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo.
In case you need help with that one, “buffalo” can mean the animal, the city, and the action “to buffalo” (i.e. to bully or intimidate).
But, I believe I have one to top all of that, and it’s true, too. Here is a sentence with the word “and” in it five times in a row:
There’s too much space between north and and and and and son.
Got it? No?
This relates to my grandfather’s business in North Yorkshire. When the eldest son came of age, he needed to change the business sign from North to North & Son. When the sign maker came back, the words had been crushed together:
North&Son
Enraged, he returned to the sign maker the next morning with the words:
There’s too much [bloody] space between North and & and & and Son!
I never knew if they got it fixed.
Like this.
It’s still early days in therapy for me, but last week the Lovely J (to borrow a phrase from a good friend) asked me something straight out of a Ben Stiller comedy.
So, tell me about your parents.
I almost cracked up. I understand that it’s a perfectly valid question to ask, and important in the ‘getting to know me’ part of it all, but there was a part of me that wanted to retort, “Tell me about yours!”
What did I do in the end? Naturally, I told her about my parents. About how my mother was a obsessive, controlling compulsive liar who loved me nonetheless (if in all the wrong ways), and my father was an emotionally distant power figure. Could it get more clichéd?
Sigh. It was kind of fun, if not terribly insightful. I wonder what she’ll conclude?
Satis Writes 