3 ms·
A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo."
- gruseom 14y agoA while ago I decided to understand this sentence well enough that I could easily re-understand it the next time I encountered it. Once I got there, I could feel how I was doing it: bundling the words into groups and making a tree out of them. But it's indistinct. I just spent a minute trying to draw the tree and couldn't. That in itself is rather interesting, since when you do that kind of thing in, say, programming, it's either fully specified or doesn't exist at all. Once you grok the 5-buffalo sentence, it's easy to see the trick that gets you to the 8-buffalo. The 5-buffalo plays on "buffalo" being both a noun and a verb. The 8-buffalo just adds a third category, which is the city "Buffalo" used as an adjective the way "California" is used in "California Girls". It's neat that at the very bottom of that page, after so many years, he finally found a documented usage earlier than his. By the way, this sentence is fun to bring up with people who haven't heard it before. It seems impossible, then hilarious, and then everyone insists on having the trick explained to them.