"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct (logical form) but semantically nonsensical. The term was originally used in his 1955 thesis "Logical Structures of Linguistic Theory". Although the sentence is grammatically correct, no obvious understandable meaning can be derived from it, and thus it demonstrates the distinction between syntax and semantics. As an example of a category mistake, it was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.
Read more about Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously: Details, Attempts At Meaningful Interpretations, Statistical Challenges, Related and Similar Examples
Famous quotes containing the words green, ideas and/or sleep:
“The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.”
—Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
“Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang and produce, be dint of serious thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)