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Re: colorless green ideas

From:Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>
Date:Thursday, April 8, 2004, 8:21
 --- Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:
> I very much like that sentence: "Colourless green > ideas sleep furiously". Could you please remember me > who proposed it first ? (Chomsky ?) > > I like it because, if you consider it from a > semantical point of view, it is completely stupid,
To me it has a very blatant meaning, though it needs to be capitalised 'colorless Green ideas sleep furiously'. It very obviously talks of dull/boring Green (environmentalist/the Greens) ideas which aren't being acted on, but there's a good deal of activists trying to change that with absolutely no chance of success. Which is a relatively accurate discription. (Sleeping furiously is perfectly normal and doesn't strike me as odd in the least (anyone who's ever been sick should know that...); nor is ideas sleeping odd; nor are Green ideas. The hardest hurdle to cross is 'colorless Green', and if we don't think the Greens are particularly interesting, that is hardly even a pebble on the already bumpy, pot-hold-filled road that is understanding language. -- Tristan Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com

Replies

Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>