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A now to learn something new…
A few weeks back we had fun learning about contronyms together. Have you come across any recently? Well, grammar is an essential part of our learning at SLOCA, and today we wanted to share with you a grammatically correct sentence that may just hurt your brain. (You’ve been warned!)
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Yes, that is the word “buffalo” eight times in a row and it is still considered a grammatically correct sentence. “How?” you may ask. Well, this sentence first appeared in 1967 in Dmitri Borgmann‘s Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. And it is a sentence composed of three homonyms — words that are spelled the same or pronounced the same but have different meanings — and it is a perfect example of lexical ambiguity.
Let’s unpack this sentence and see if we can clear up some of the ambiguity. As we learn early on in our grammar curriculum, every sentence needs a noun and a verb. In this sentence, there are two nouns with different meanings. One is the common noun “buffalo”, referring to the North American Bison. (For the purpose of understanding this sentence, it is important to know that when referring to buffalo collectively, it is still “buffalo”.) The other noun is a proper noun referring to the city in western New York. So now that we have our nouns, we need our verb. Did you know that it is possible to buffalo? To buffalo can mean either to puzzle, baffle, or confuse OR it can mean to impress or intimidate by a show of power. In this sentence, it is the latter definition. Does the sentence make sense now?
Well, here is an expanded version of the sentence with the original word order.
Buffalo bison, that other Buffalo bison bully, also bully Buffalo bison.
And just for more fun, here is the sentence diagrammed and a parse tree.
Still feeling confused? Perhaps this explanatory video will help.
Buffalo buffalo buffalo: One-word sentences and how they work.
We hope you enjoyed learning something new today. Share this sentence with your kids and see what they say. Maybe challenge them to diagram it or see if they can make up their own one-word sentences. Happy learning!!!
1 thought on “Learn Something New: Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo…”
Wow–this is really cool!