Laurels were only meant to decorate your head, but you expect to ride on them all your life. Lovemaking to you is an achievement. The blocky angular plastic world around you has left its mark in your head - its jagged edges continue to hurt you from within. You smile just so people will not bother you with their concern, your life simply ticks by the sound of bugs crackling on the bug killer. While your hand curls up yet again to give you empty pleasure, and while the world momentarily fades out, giving you one moment of clarity, one moment to move up to the ceiling of the room and see yourself as you are and be free of all the hazy lights and the screens and the unbearable noise, you consider giving it all up. That's the only way. Clear and delightfully simple.

A moment later you are washing your hands, and all the years of filth come back inside you, and you fear the clarity once again.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"

This is a very well-known line uttered by none other than Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct but nonsensical in meaning. It was uttered primarily to illustrate the inadequacy of grammar based systems that donot attempt to take semantics and pragmatics of the utterance into account.

The nonsense of this line is rather obvious. However, one can argue that it is always possible to think of a situation in which this line will make sense - in fact most of us see vivid images in our heads when we read this sentence. One could argue, for example, that most of the words are figurative - that colourless means nondescript and green means immature, yeilding the more comprehensive reading:

"Nondescript immature ideas have violent nightmares"

In fact, Stanford held a literary competition in 1985 where the participants had to write prose or poetry of a limited length where this sentence would seem meaningful. The prizewinning entry by D. A. H. Byatt is reproduced here:

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.

Just shows the infinite depth of our imagination, doesn't it? (Or is it uncountably finite?)

Finally, speaking of nonsensical utterances, here's a classical quote conjured up impromptu by Samuel Foote when he wanted to test Charles Macklin's claim that he could memorize any text in a single reading.

"So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage-leaf to make an apple-pie; and at the same time a great she-bear, coming up the street, pops its head into the shop. "What! No soap?" So he died, and she very imprudently married the barber; and there were present the Picninnies, and the Joblillies, and the Garyalies, and the grand Panjandrum himself, with the little round button at top, and they all fell to playing the game of catch-as-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out at the heels of their boots."

You can find more nonsense here. Meanwhile, can you write a short poem or prose where Chomsky's expression will find meaning? Let's impose the same limits as the original contest - 100 words of prose or 14 lines of poetry. Post your bits of creativity as comments to this post!