A while ago I decided to understand this sentence well enough that I could easily re-understand it the next time I encountered it. Once I got there, I could feel how I was doing it: bundling the words into groups and making a tree out of them. But it's indistinct. I just spent a minute trying to draw the tree and couldn't. That is interesting, since when you do that kind of thing in programming, it's either fully specified or doesn't exist.<p>Once you grok the 5-buffalo sentence, it's easy to see the trick that gets you to the 8-buffalo. The 5-buffalo plays on "buffalo" being both a noun and a verb. The 8-buffalo just adds a third category, which is the city "Buffalo" used as an adjective the way "California" is used in "California Girls".<p>It's neat that at the very bottom of that page, after so many years, he finally found a documented usage earlier than his.<p>This sentence is fun to bring up with people who haven't heard it before. It seems impossible, then hilarious, and then everyone insists on having the trick explained to them.