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Привет, and welcome back to Travel as Interesting, the Russian travel channel that
used to be about kind of interesting things before we ran out of kind of interesting things
and sold to a Russian media conglomerate!
One quick note: sincere congratulations to our mighty leader Vladimir for winning the
2024 election!
Now, here are some of my favorite places to go in Russia: uh, Moscow!
And, uh, this building?
And… uh… this guy’s house… ah, who am I kidding?
I’m not cut out for this.
I mean, way more people have been to Russia than I have, and honestly, I’m really more
qualified to talk about interesting pieces of linguistics trivia instead, like how the
sentence “more people have been to Russia than I have,” is totally meaningless and
an iconic example of something called an “Escher sentence.”
Take a look at it again.
It doesn’t make any sense when you actually think about it, but you didn’t pick up on
that when I first said it, did you?
Fortunately, there’s a simple explanation for this: you are a big dumb dummy.
To be fair, though, everyone is.
Well, I’m not, of course.
I mean, look how many YouTube subscribers I have—that’s big brain territory—but
all your brains are mushy, and lazy, and when parsing language, they often take convenient
shortcuts by relying on familiar structures and patterns.
The sentence looks right because it’s a seamless blend between two sensible grammatical
palettes, and when combined, your brain is still able to find a vague meaning that’s
somewhere in between the two.
In fact, we’re so reliant on common linguistic structures that unconventional but still totally
grammatically-correct sentences can be almost impossible for us to understand, like “I
think toilet paper should go in the under orientation,” or… maybe a better example
would be “The horse raced past the barn fell.”
Did the barn… fall?
Is a “barn fell” a thing?
Like, some kind of Amish funeral or something?
What does this sentence mean?
Well, if we modify it like this, it suddenly becomes super clear that it was actually the
horse that bit the dust.
“The horse raced past the barn fell” is a great example of a “garden path sentence,”
where an ambiguity in a word’s meaning can lead our brains down the wrong linguistic
“path,” sort of like how an ambiguous sign can lead my bike down the wrong path
and into a surprisingly real-looking mural of a tunnel, shattering my spine and likewise
shattering my chances of ever making it to the Tour de France, giving me no option but
to become an incredibly successful and popular YouTuber instead.
Basically, we expect “raced” to be an active verb, since that’s usually how sentences
are structured—we wouldn’t have any way of knowing that it’s actually a passive
verb until we’ve finished reading the sentence, gotten all confused and angry, and thrown
our computer at the intern.
This sort of lexical ambiguity can take reasonable, legitimate sentences and make them look completely
incoherent to the average person.
This is why my recent police report, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo” landed me in a psych ward while those horrible buffalo continued to roam free.
Whether my nurse believed it or not, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
buffalo” is actually a completely grammatically correct sentence, but given that every word
here is ambiguous, it’s essentially impossible to read without explanation.
You see, “buffalo” can be an animal, a town in New York, or, if you’re an eccentric
old man living in 19th century rural America, it can be a verb, meaning “to bully.”
I was merely attempting to explain that buffalo from Buffalo, which other buffalo from Buffalo
bully, also bully buffalo from Buffalo.
Or, in other words, Buffalo buffalo, which Buffalo buffalo buffalo, also buffalo Buffalo
buffalo.
Y’know, it might sound like silly nonsense to you, but sooner or later, one of these
buffalo is going to get hurt, and you can blame lexical ambiguity for that.
You can also blame lexical ambiguity for my failure to pass police reform laws in Police,
Poland, where my plan was, essentially, “Police police Police police police police Police
police.”
In fact, you can take any word that serves as a collective noun, adjective, and verb,
and turn it into an equally incoherent yet legitimate sentence.
I mean, it won’t get you anywhere besides that psych ward, but you can take comfort
in knowing that you technically didn’t break any grammatical rules along the way.
Now, it’s hard to write a more confusing sentence than that without breaking any rules
in English, but much like our potential for surveilling our own citizens using terrifying
facial-recognition software, China has the English-speaking world narrowly beat.
In fact, there’s an entire Chinese poem called “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”
composed of 92 characters, all of which are pronounced “shi,” just with different
tones.
Now, if this poem looks unreadable to you, it’s probably because you don’t speak
Chinese, unless you do, in which case it’s probably because the Romanized version of
this poem is pretty much incomprehensible to Chinese-speakers and kind of just looks
like the transcript of a helicopter taking off.
You see, this poem makes perfect sense when written out in Chinese characters, with each
character having a different core meaning, or when spoken in certain Sinitic languages
like Cantonese, where the syllables have 22 different pronunciations, but in present-day
Standard Mandarin, which has been vastly simplified over the past century, there are only four
distinct syllables in the entire poem, making it almost impossible to understand.
It also doesn’t help that the poem is about a guy that’s addicted to eating lions but
ends up eating a bunch of rocks that look like lions instead, which is honestly a pretty
bad premise and confusing enough as-is, but I’ll leave the narrative analysis to the
experts down in the YouTube comments section.
Now, if all of the sentences you write are as incomprehensible as the ones I’ve talked
about today, you might want to check out Hanif Abdurraqib’s class, “Writing for Expression:
How to Make Your Words More Artful & Lyrical,” which you can watch today on Skillshare.
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design, entrepreneurship, digital music production, and pretty much anything else you’d ever
want to learn, but better yet, you can do so for only a few minutes a day.
You could take the time you normally spend wandering in aimless circles around your house
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Well, best of all, the first 1000 people to visit skl.sh/hai36 can get 2 months of Skillshare
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