"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 green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splended sickness, the sickness of the pearl;”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.”
—Harold MacMillan (1894–1986)
“The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last crisis—the final overthrow.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)