Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously? (1997)

In 1985 some students at Stanford organized a competition:<p>&gt; you were asked to compose not more than 100 words of prose, or 14 lines of verse, in which a sentence described as grammatically acceptable but without meaning did, in the event, become meaningful. The sentence, devised by Noam Chomsky, was: colourless green ideas sleep furiously.<p>Four winning entries here: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archives.conlang.info&#x2F;ga&#x2F;farzhi&#x2F;shiarweilwoen.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archives.conlang.info&#x2F;ga&#x2F;farzhi&#x2F;shiarweilwoen.html</a>

It&#x27;s funny the author wasted energy composing this after admitting he barely knows the origin of the sentence. Chomsky invokes it in &quot;Syntactic Structures&quot; to illustrate that the grammaticality of a given sentence doesn&#x27;t fully explain the odds of it appearing in a large corpus. &quot;Furiously sleep ideas green colorless&quot; is another low probability sentence, yet a native speaker couldn&#x27;t perform these sorts of mental gymnastics to twist some meaning out of it.

The author is working very hard to build an indifference to the self into what is an emotional and psychological meaning to that phrase. Logic and language rules only get you so far removed from desires and romantic realities. I get these attempts are innocent from an american cultural perspective, but paul is not the next colbert.<p>I never get tired of the internal contradictions people rely on to dismiss what is in front of their face. The start of this article declares that the phrase is meaningless and then ends with a fake revelation that the author has defined it&#x27;s meaning. The author is so determined that the initial reaction is meaningless that we need to read three paragraphs about palming off nature to a language game.<p>Bring back Steve Jobs.

With the rise of the Green Movement the sentence has actually taken on a semblance of meaning.

&gt; Do Colorless Ideas Sleep Furiously?<p>Racter would definitely say so.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Racter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Racter</a>

I see the title has been modified post hoc to include a year.. but it&#x27;s wrong. It should actually be 1997...