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A linguistics professor wrote a sentence on the board: THE OLD MAN THE BOAT.
The students stared.
“Parse it,” he said.
A brave student tried. “The old man… is on the boat?”
“That’s what your brain wants to believe. But look again.”
“The old man… the boat?”
“Yes. ‘Man’ is the verb. To man. The old people staff the vessel.”
The class groaned.
“This is called a garden-path sentence,” said the professor. “English leads you down one interpretation, then forces you to backtrack when you hit the end. Like reading ‘The horse raced past the barn fell.’ Your brain wants ‘raced’ to be the main verb. It isn’t.”
He wrote another: THE COMPLEX HOUSES MARRIED AND SINGLE SOLDIERS AND THEIR FAMILIES.
“This sentence is about a housing complex, not about complex houses. But you won’t know that until word six.”
A student at the back raised her hand. “So English is a language where you can read half a sentence, think you understand it, discover you’re wrong, and have to start over?”
“Yes.”
“And native speakers do this without noticing?”
“They notice it just enough to feel vaguely confused. Then they blame themselves.”
“That’s diabolical.”
The professor smiled. “Now read this: ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.’ It’s a grammatically complete sentence. We’ll discuss it after the weekend.”
Nobody came back after the weekend.
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