Brett

Cool exploration of words related to Pb (lead)

Examples:

“…plumbous, which means leaden or heavy.”

plumbing

plumbers

Lead is “…useful in working out the depth of water, as currents will not sway it much. Therefore one can plumb the depths using a plumb line. The weight will plunge into the water (from Latin plumbicare) and then plummet to the very bottom. The line will remain perfectly upright, or as the French would put it à plomb. If a person were to remain so upright in the currents and whirlpools of life, they would therefore display perfect aplomb.

7 Sentences That Sound Crazy But Are Still Grammatical

allthingslinguistic:

Seven implausibly grammatical sentences from Mental Floss: 

1. ONE MORNING I SHOT AN ELEPHANT IN MY PAJAMAS. HOW HE GOT INTO MY PAJAMAS I’LL NEVER KNOW.

Take advantage of the fact that the same sentence can have two different structures. This famous joke from Groucho Marx assumes that most people expect the structure of the first part to be

One morning [I shot an elephant] [in my pajamas].

But another possible, and perfectly grammatical, reading is

One morning [I shot] [an elephant in my pajamas].

4. THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.

Make a sentence with multiple center embeddings. We usually have no problem putting one clause inside another in English. We can take “the rat ate the malt” and stick in more information to make “the rat the cat killed ate the malt.”  But the more clauses we add in, the harder it gets to understand the sentence. In this case, the rat ate the malt. After that it was killed by a cat. That cat had been chased by a dog. The grammar of the sentence is fine. The style, not so good.

7. THIS EXCEEDING TRIFLING WITLING, CONSIDERING RANTING CRITICIZING CONCERNING ADOPTING FITTING WORDING BEING EXHIBITING TRANSCENDING LEARNING, WAS DISPLAYING, NOTWITHSTANDING RIDICULING, SURPASSING BOASTING SWELLING REASONING, RESPECTING CORRECTING ERRING WRITING, AND TOUCHING DETECTING DECEIVING ARGUING DURING DEBATING.

This sentence takes advantage of the versatile English –ing. The author of a 19th century grammar guide lamented the fact that one could “run to great excess” in the use of –ing participles “without violating any rule of our common grammars,” and constructed this sentence to prove it. It doesn’t seem so complicated once you realize it means,

“This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate.”

Read the rest of the sentences in the article. 

These weird-but-grammatical sentences illustrate an important fact about sentence construction: we don’t just use syntactic rules to put words together, but we also need to consider how much memory or processing power is available to make sense of them. If you put enough thought into these seven sentences, you can get them to mean something reasonable, but it definitely takes a bit more thinking. 

(And then there’s also pragmatics, which is what makes it weird to say “the sky is orange” or “yesterday I walked my pet dinosaur” or the classic “colourless green ideas sleep furiously”). 

I love #4. “THE RAT THE CAT THE DOG CHASED KILLED ATE THE MALT.”