[lit-ideas] Re: Violence as Destruction of Doubt
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 16 Sep 2005 11:51:14 +0900
On 2005/09/16, at 9:24, JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx wrote:
If this line wasn't in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it
should have been.
I believe (admitting a degree of uncertainty) that I first read it
in something by Chomsky, used as a demonstration that a grammatical
sentence can be semantically null.
My belief has just been confirmed by the following found at http://
home.tiac.net/~cri/1997/chomsky.html
The sentence, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", was
presented by Chomsky, as a great example of a series of words
strung together randomly. Not only is it grammatical according to
the lexical classification, and non-sense on a semantic level. Or
so goes the claim. But is the claim correct?
A green idea is, according to well established usage of the word
"green" is one that is an idea that is new and untried. Again, a
colorless idea is one without vividness, dull and unexciting. So it
follows that a colorless green idea is a new, untried idea that is
without vividness, dull and unexciting. To sleep is, among other
things, is to be in a state of dormancy or inactivity, or in a
state of unconsciousness. To sleep furiously may seem a puzzling
turn of phrase but one reflects that the mind in sleep often indeed
moves furiously with ideas and images flickering in and out.
So what is the poet telling us? (One assumes that the quoted line
is from the work of a poet working in a medium of studied precision
and ambiguity. Or rather, as we shall see...) Very simply the poet
seems to be saying that new ideas, not yet sharply defined,
circulate in the unconscious, rapidly altering at a furious rate.
One is left then with a question. Why is this nice bit of poetic
imagery cited by its author as a quintessentially meaningless
sentence? Here we have an exquisite bit of irony. The author
evidently has a turn for poetry, a turn which he turns his face
against. And the hidden face, the denied self, has taken its
revenge. The scientist has called on his creative self to exhibit a
bit of nonsense. The poet denied has replied with a sentence,
apparently meaningless, which is no such thing when listened to
with an attentive ear. And yet consider; this sentence is a very
intellectualized production - it is indeed "colorless". It was, we
suspect, a new idea, a variant of a possibility, still new at the
very moment of production, one occurring by chance in the froth of
the unconscious.
The author's argument is, I observe, the same as that with which, in
a lighter hearted vein, Mike Geary has just replied to Robert Paul.
John McCreery
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