Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously - Attempts at Meaningful Interpretations

Attempts At Meaningful Interpretations

The sentence can be given an interpretation through polysemy. Both green and colorless have figurative meanings, which allow colorless to be interpreted as "nondescript" and green as "immature". The sentence can therefore be construed as "nondescript immature ideas have violent nightmares", a phrase with less oblique semantics. In particular, the phrase can have legitimate meaning too, if green is understood to mean "newly-formed" and sleep can be used to figuratively express mental or verbal dormancy. An equivalent sentence would be "Newly formed bland ideas are inexpressible in an infuriating way."

Writers have attempted to provide the sentence meaning through context, the first of which was written by Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. A literary competition was held at Stanford University in 1985, in which the contestants were invited to make Chomsky's sentence meaningful using not more than 100 words of prose or 14 lines of verse. An example entry from the competition, from C.M. Street, is:

It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.