Re: colorless green ideas

 --- 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