# Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This is likely the least useful post I've published here. But maybe it's not *entirely* useless, plus I think it's somewhat entertaining, so I'll go ahead with it anyway.

The Sentence
------------

As you may or may not have heard before, "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is a grammatically correct English sentence. For those who are astounded by this, feel free to try to get behind its meaning on your own before reading on.

A first hint, particularly for non-native English speakers, is simply that "buffalo" in this sentence has three different meanings: a noun (the animal, ~bison), a verb (~to deceive), and a city (well, Buffalo).

As a hopefully sufficient explanation: another way to write the sentence would be "Bison from Bufallo, who other bison from Buffalo tend to deceive, deceive Bison from Bufallo". So the initial "Buffalo buffalo" is the subject, followed by "Buffalo buffalo buffalo" as a relative sentence, followed by "buffalo" as the verb and finally "Buffalo buffalo" as the object of the sentence.

If you want to know even more, there's a nice [wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo) about it.

Reflections
-----------

![](https://39669.cdn.cke-cs.com/rQvD3VnunXZu34m86e5f/images/4e32b365e6b50991eb2563d12114928aca872759a08b4b21.png)

Basically me, for the better part of the last 10 years.

Surprisingly, I'm not only writing this post to share the very valuable information of the nature of this interesting sentence. Additionally I'll leave you with the following mildly embarassing realization: I've known about this sentence for at least 10 years. But until a few months ago it remained a mystery to me. My attitude towards it had been something like "no way this can ever make sense to me! Surely the explanation of how it works is super complicated and maybe also boring and I may not be able to intuitively understand it at all". So I just lived in a state of ignorance, very occasionally wondering what it may be like to be the kind of person who is able to really grasp that sentence.

In hindsight, this of course seems rather ridiculous. Now I feel a bit bad for being the kind of person who heard about this sentence, was curious about how on Earth that can be a real sentence, but then didn't even spend the two minutes it would have taken to actually figure it out. Fixed mindset at work.

My own personal take-away is that this surely is not the only time in my life where I'm falling for that mental "this is surely out of my range" trap, causing me to accept not knowing/understanding/mastering something due to a similar kind of self-deception. It might in fact even relate to imposter syndrome: there's a number of things in my area of supposed expertise (and work) that confuse me, and I somehow have this ingrained belief that I won't be able to get behind these things even if I tried. So rather than trying to get a better understanding of these things, I instead just hope that nobody will notice. What makes this more difficult is that often it's not a conscious process. If I consciously thought "I will never be able to understand X", I would probably notice what an unlikely and limiting belief that is. But it's usually more of a vague feeling of beyond-me-ness that makes me flinch away from a topic, without a perfectly clear understanding of where that aversion is coming from.

So where does this leave us?

Firstly, If you're the kind of person who has managed to internalize the opposite behaviour – to be actively curious and to embrace the challenge of getting behind something you don't understand yet – I'd suggest you feel either grateful for or proud of having gotten there, as it seems like a very useful character trait.

As for me, I'll do my best to look out more for this internal motion of shying away from something because of some implicit fear of not being able to make sense of it. And hopefully this will allow me to ultimately change my attitude towards such occurrences to something more productive. If things to well, 6 months from now I'll be able to comment on this post again, and point to a few concrete examples where I overcame this aversion and actually sat down to understand something that used to overwhelmingly confuse me.