Talk:Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

message: The article focuses on a relatively insignificant aspect - the sentence's meaninglessness. But the main point was proving that probabilistic models of grammar are inadequate, and for that the meaninglessness doesn't matter, it was just enough for neither the sentence nor any part of it to had ever been used in English. Taw 00:06, 4 December 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Purpose of the sentence 

message: Shouldn't this article be titled "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." with a period?  It is a sentence, after all.  Unless there is some naming convention or technical restriction of which I am not aware, I propose that this page be moved to the aforementioned title.  If there are no objections, I'll do it in a few days.  Imaginaryoctopus(talk) 06:28, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I've moved it back, as virtually all of the incoming links don't have the period. The period isn't essential in the article title, as the phrase could be grammatically used as part of a longer sentence, for example. — sjorford++ 10:07, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously as another pair of socks drapes backwards"? ~user:orngjce223how am I typing? 02:30, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Article title

message: *Eduard doesn't have his own page yet, so I'll have to ask this here... the dates in this sentance seem entirely wrong... he died in 1933, and then published a book in 1954 containing theories he'd written about in the late 1930s. I can understand him dying in 1933 and then a book of his works being published at a later date (1954), but the "late 1930s" doesn't seem to fit there at all. Can somebody familiar with this material check this for me? Thanks.
::the Estonian writer Eduard Vilde (1865–1933) made the same point in his 1954 book (which was mostly written in the late 1930s), writing "The urchin sat on the roof and cried, as if rabbits were running along the tin-pipe towards the eternity, holding lycoperdons in their mouths", etc.
:Maelwys 20:21, 2 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Eduard Vilde 

message: Is it possible we can have the quote unbolded? It makes it fantastically annoying to read when applied to such an amount of text. W guice 20:51, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "The full passage says..." 

message: I've update the translation. "Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite" is more accuratly reflected with "The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail" than "The vertabral silence worries the legal sail".
156.34.25.187 03:26, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lucien Tesnère's Quote 

message: Which picture is better? 
The current one:
Or this one:
Replace with better one. --128.6.175.89 18:46, 5 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Picture 

message: There was a contest in 1985 for poems and prose using the sentence: http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/2/2-457.html
64.160.39.153 03:28, 13 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  poetry contest 

message: George Carlin used a similar comedy routine called "Things You Never Hear", on his album Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics.
Unless I'm mistaking what this article is about, this line shouldn't be in this article as everything Carlin says in this routine makes sense semantically. I didn't want to remove it myself in case I was misinterpreting the article, though I think this is unsuitable. Anoldtreeok (talk) 08:51, 1 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remove line about George Carlin 

message: It seems that "I have no green idea" is a Hebrew idiom, which originates in Polish (nie ma zielonego pojecia) according to Rubik Rozenthal in his Linguistic Ring in Maariv. But he has no green idea where it came from. 
So Rubik has no green idea where I have no green idea in Polish came from has meaning. 
פשוט pashute ♫ (talk) 18:49, 24 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  The origin of green ideas 

message: I've wondered for a long time if a political interpretation of the sentence might not appear very obvious now. In fact, it is claimed here that it was once used as a slogan on a protest banner (or billboard?) at a congress of the British Conservative Party, although the Everything2 page linked to does not mention a banner (or billboard). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:52, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Political interpretation 

message: I would argue that the sentance was only meaningless before Chomsky formulated it. Now it has the meaning of being an example for a semantically meaningless sentance attached to it. It is understood this way by other recipients as this article and other citations show. Some people will read the sentance and say "Ah, Chomsky!" Of course, some people will not get it, but this is also true for laymen reading a paper about branes in string theory. -- 195.14.217.98 (talk) 12:25, 6 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: That would be its social meaning, like "Would you mind closing the door?" being a request, and not an inquiry into the other person's mental state.  The propositional meaning is still quite obscure... AnonMoos (talk) 08:23, 7 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: While the above is true, nevertheless it's moot as a reputable publication or journal must publish a critique or article saying it is no longer meaningless before the encyclopedia article can change to accommodate IP's whim. Without which this discussion is bordering on WP:FORUM grounds. JesseRafe (talk) 16:07, 7 December 2017 (UTC)

text: I would argue that the sentance was only meaningless before Chomsky formulated it. -- Who the f*** cares? Nothing that you or almost anyone else has written on this page is at all relevant to Wikipedia ... it's all original research, opinion, synthesis ... everything except what is relevant, which is cited material from reliable sources. -- Jibal (talk) 05:44, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not meaningless any more 

message: Why is "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" ungrammatical? It seems correct to me if "sleep" is taken to be a transitive verb in the imperative and "ideas green colorless" as a noun phrase with postpositive adjectives. 79.176.173.15 (talk) 09:23, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Because "ideas green colorless" isn't English and putting the adverb in front of "sleep" is poetic language at best (though granted, that on its own isn't ungrammatical, strictly speaking).--Megaman en m (talk) 13:25, 10 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, but "Because [it] isn't English" is a homunculus argument; it doesn't explain why the phrase isn't a grammatical use of postpositive adjectives. 79.176.173.15 (talk) 23:40, 10 March 2022 (UTC)

text: Right, and also "green" can be parsed as the verb with "sleep ideas" as the subject. But if it is the sentence Chomsky used as an ungrammatical example, we have to write as such, and only if there are reliable sources that state even the second example could be parsed can we mention it. Nardog (talk) 00:14, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Isn't there an applicable exception to that policy?  After all, there aren't going to reliable sources that point out and repudiate every wrong claim anybody has ever made, and in this instance the wrongness is easily verifiable using a dictionary. 79.179.70.90 (talk) 07:17, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not so sure Chomsky is wrong -- You have to really stretch things to come up with any real English parsing of "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless", while "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" falls securely into the Jabberwocky zone: the words don't result in any very clear meaning when they come together, but the way they come together follows basic ordinary rules of English syntax, and doesn't require any straining to parse.  To put it another way, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" has a Mad-Libs effect, while "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" is more of a "word salad"... AnonMoos (talk) 14:33, 14 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Furiously sleep ideas green colorless" grammaticality 

message: As we are editing this wiki for a school project, my group created a few suggestions for the page. We are planning to generalize the main headers, while adding more detail below about the research that went into analyzing this phenomenon. For instance, under the statistical challenges header, we believe that there is more to be said. In turn, we are expanding that section into 'Critiques of Chomsky" (not final header title) to include other research that has been done. As Chomsky mentions the use of the sentence was not meant to be spoken, this header will also share research on the infamous sentence in face-to-face conversation. Another suggestion we may implement is finding or creating a better photo to represent the tree. We believe that the tree currently on the wiki is too complicated and does not convey the sentence clearly for any readers who are unaware of or unfamiliar with the concept. Finally, we are planning on adding a significant amount of new content regarding poetry that has been made to create meaning to the sentence. Mtytang (talk) 22:06, 13 April 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi, sorry I did not see this from last week, just the flurry of recent changes. There are resources specifically for students working on Wikipedia for a school project, link left on you and your classmate's user talk pages. One thing to keep in mind is that Wikipedia is always "finished" so please don't add content under the wrong header with the intention to rename the header later. A word doc or your user sandbox is the place for getting a draft together, or even making a draft in your user namespace. So then you can compile and edit all your critiques of Chomsky and add them with that header rather than piggybacking on something extant and different. Also, if you expand your focus on Wikipedia or ask questions on other talk pages or Wikiprojects, keep in mind your account is only supposed to represent you and using first person plural might be suspicious to others not familiar with a page history. It's okay to be overt, though, and specifically say that there are two of you, "user KN Dela Cruz (linking optional) and I are planning" rather than "we are planning" makes it clear you're not mouthpiecing for a joint account. Cheers, JesseRafe (talk) 14:08, 19 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposed changes 

message: The "Attempts at meaningful interpretations" section includes two Craiyon AI depictions of how that software has attempted to illustrate the phrase, with some level of human curation. We don't know if the uploader had to add further style keywords, and we can probably assume that they chose to upload the two outputs that seemed most interesting to them personally.
But the article text has nothing to say about AI interpretations of the sentence. A reader intrigued by the images can read nothing further about them. MOS:PERTINENCE asks that "Images must be significant and relevant in the topic's context, not primarily decorative."
Is there anything to say about how an AI "interprets" a nonsense phrase when asked to draw or otherwise react to it? Lord Belbury (talk) 08:10, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  AI comprehension and illustrations 

message: The redirect Noam Chomsky/Colorless green ideas sleep furiously has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  Someone who's wrong on the internet (talk) 08:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Noam Chomsky/Colorless green ideas sleep furiously]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: Article says: "Dell Hymes presented his work to show that nonsense words can develop into something meaningful." However, I see no particular meaning in the Hymes poem. 2A00:23C5:FE56:6C01:5C4B:B84D:3215:24D9 (talk) 18:04, 9 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Dell Hymes poem