5 ms·
Police is a much better word for this, IMHO. :) To spell it out, it's an adjective (e.g police car) verb (e.g. police the streets) and obviously a noun. Buffalo
by peetle 8y ago
Police is a much better word for this, IMHO. :) To spell it out, it's an adjective (e.g police car) verb (e.g. police the streets) and obviously a noun. Buffalo has never struck me as a very good verb...
- peetle 8y agoObviously, police that police police police police, and those that police that group, police police police, police police police.
- michaelt 8y agoHere in the UK, I've never seen buffalo used as a verb, so the buffalo sentence has never seemed all that clever to me. I've always preferred the publican's complaint - "This sign is painted wrong, you missed the spaces between Dog and and, and and and Duck" - because it doesn't rely on unmarked compounds like police-police or Buffalo-buffalo no-one uses outside linguistic puzzles :)
- drostie 8y agoYou could tack on several more if the fragment being corrected is "...conjunctions like butandandandor..." so that they are missing spaces between but and and, and and and and, and and and and, and and and or, and commas would help immensely.
- SilasX 8y agoAmerican here. Never heard anyone use “buffalo” as a verb either outside of this puzzle. “Police police” (as well as extensions) is reasonable enough: “Internal Affairs is like the police police.” “So are their supervisors like, the police police police?”
- code_duck 8y agoIt has a valid usage that’s somewhat archaic. I’ve run into the term in literature and old TV.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWe should name a town Police. Perhaps if you were from Buffalo where the Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo you'd be more receptive to the idea.
- quietbritishjim 8y agoIt's subjective of course, but for me buffalo is more satisfying because the noun, adjective and verb are all totally different words, whereas for police they're all variants of the same root.
- yesbabyyes 8y agoI'm pretty sure all variants of buffalo are from the same root? Edit: A buffalo is a member of a number of species of large antelope, to buffalo is to either act as a buffalo or hunt buffalo, and Buffalo is any of several places where there used to be a lot of buffalo before people buffaloed them to near extinction. On the other hand, there's a town in Poland called Police...
- skj 8y agoDo you find buffalo particularly bewildering? or in the city of Buffalo?
- apocolyps6 8y agobuffalo (v.) "alarm, overawe," 1900, from buffalo (n.). Probably from the animals' tendency to mass panic. Related: Buffaloed; buffaloing. Buffalo city in western New York state, U.S., of disputed origin (there never were bison thereabouts), perhaps from the name of a native chief, or a corruption of French beau fleuve "beautiful river."
- onychomys 8y agoAlthough antelope and buffalo are both in the family bovidae, a buffalo isn't a large antelope. That's especially true of the animals that Americans call buffalo and antelope, where Antilocapra isn't even in that same family.
- yesbabyyes 8y agoMy bad; the ancient Greeks were not so discriminating. ;) I am aware that the bison is not even a buffalo. But then again, it is, isn't it? That that is, is. That that is not, is not. Is that it? It is.
- Camillo 8y agoI don't think it makes sense to say that "police" is an adjective in the same sense that "happy" is an adjective. Otherwise all nouns are also adjectives. _Any_ noun in English can be placed in front of another noun to serve as an attribute, because that is a feature of English syntax, but that is different from the distinction between nouns and adjectives as classes of words. The decision to use the word "adjective" both for the part of speech and for the syntactical role is a mistake.