Colourless green ideas (and things like that…). More often than we think, languages actually struggle NOT to make sense. It’s easy to focus on the difficulties with expressing ourselves or in understanding others, but truth be told, part of the problem is that we always make some sense of the nonsense, even if that is not what the other person meant. Making sense is what we are programmed to do.

It was Noam Chomsky who came up with the sentence: ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’. He had worked very hard at finding a sentence without any meaning, or at least one that had likely never been spoken before. How can green be colourless, it’s a colour? How can ideas be green, they are an abstract concept not a concrete entity? They are also inanimate, so they cannot sleep. How can sleep be furious? Well, strictly speaking it can’t, sleep itself can’t be angry or violent, but the person sleeping might be in the middle of a nightmare and thrashing about the bed. In ‘sensible’ language we don’t usually muddle up inanimate objects with agency or assign objects contradictory properties like being ‘green’ and ‘colourless’. In the ‘real’ world these things don’t make any sense.

But then, words always mean more than their strict denotation. They always fit into a wider spectrum of meaning that gives them interesting connotations when combined with others, which means that nonsensical language can sometimes make sense. And so, piece by piece with metonymic and metaphoric references the ‘meaningless’ sentence gains its poetic expressivity.  In 1985 Stanford University held a competition for poets to make meaning out of this meaningless sentence. Some of the results can be found here.

This example also shows that making sense does not necessarily mean bearing any relation to reality. Very often language is used to create logical or grammatical other worlds which can be delightful escapist fictions. A recurrent theme of using foreign languages is the feeling, probably derived from a lack of emotional attachment to the words, that you don’t have to mean what you say. As the protagonist, Hans Castorp, puts it in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) by Thomas Mann (2000 [1924]) :

“Moi, tu le remarques bien, je ne parle guère le français. Pourtant, avec toi je préfère cette langue à la mienne, car pour moi, parler français, c’est parler sans parler, en quelque manière, – sans responsabilité, ou comme nous parlons en rêve. Tu comprends?” p.465.

(You may have noticed that I can hardly speak French. Yet, with you I prefer this language to my own, because for me, speaking French is like speaking without speaking, somehow, – without responsibility, or as though speaking in a dream. Do you see?)

In the days before the communicative approach to language learning, often the writers of early language learning textbooks seem to get deeply caught up in these possibilities. Someone I know once cited the most memorable sentence from their French schooldays as being ‘la plume de ma tante est sur le bureau de mon oncle’ (my aunt’s feather is on my uncle’s writing desk) – quite apart from the fact that nowadays very few aunts possess feathers and very few uncles writing desks, even at the time it’s not a sentence that would have been used all that often; but it is a nice way to remember gender in French! Occasionally, this playfulness extends to phrase books which really are meant to provide connection to the everyday. Sometimes these are simply bizarre:

Ef a el hȳ whetha (Cornish) He can clothe her.

For others you wonder which traveller with barely a few words of the language would be brave enough to attempt them:

Alla bela-nɩ ver-sin (Turkish) May God bring you misfortune/damn you!

In other cases, it’s just odd to see the banal conversation of everyday life taken out of context, or to imagine the kind of life that the writer of the phrase book envisions in the country and the things we are thought most likely to need to say in the local language:

Lahko popravite to protenzo? (Slovene) Could you repair these dentures?

Is dit gebied boven/onder de zeespiegel? (Dutch) Is this area above/below sea level?

Wo können wir Gleitschirm fliegen? (German) Where can we go paragliding?

Tá barraíocht cnoc ann. (Irish) There are too many hills.

Er isch vercharet worde. (Swiss German) He has been run over.

Ikollok kirxa għada? (Maltese) Will you have tripe tomorrow?

This strange representation of a land and its people coming through the language learning materials is nowhere more apparent than in the Irish-language television soap Ros na Rún (roughly Headland of the Secret) on TG4, which shows twice a week with English subtitles. Apart from the sometimes dire acting and script restricted by the needs of language learners, watching this occasionally from the comfort of Dublin I am growing increasingly afraid of ever heading to the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking regions of Ireland) and meeting real Gaeilgeoirí. As far as I can make out they are all homicidal, suicidal or adulterous and given to serious levels of backstabbing. Given that Irish is now effectively a foreign language to most of the people in Ireland, maybe Hans Castorp was right. Not using a language you feel viscerally attached to ultimately leads to irresponsible behaviour! All the same, despite these trioblóidí (troubles), the murderers, adulterers and other deviants all still need to say dia dhuit (hello) and slán abhaile (safe home) to each other, so we have something in common after all. Who knows what might happen if I actually went to the Gaeltacht…

In general, I think that more often than we like to admit language skirts at the margins of order and tips into chaotic expressivity focused on form and flounce rather than sense and meaning. It is difficult to tame the wayward tongue. On several occasions I have met people who have learnt German at school but have since given it up. They often exclaim when they know I speak the language: ‘Ah, all I can remember is “Wie komme ich bitte am besten zum Bahnhof”!’ (How do I get to the station, please?) This appears to be a banal request for information, functional and purposeful. It’s interesting that above all else, they held onto the phrase which would get them out of the country. Nonetheless, beyond its practicality there is a certain poetry about it. I would suggest that it is this poetry more than the need for escape which glues the phrase into people’s minds. There is the lovely alliteration of the b in bitte-besten-Bahnhof and the repeated strong-weak stress pattern of the words. So perhaps it is more the form and fun of the language that really matters after all. It’s the nonsense that sets language alive in our minds and gives us its sense of, if not reality, then at least vitality and our sense of emotional connection to it. The sound /b/ is one of the first that children acquire as they lie in their cots enjoying the pleasure of banging their lips together again and again and again: b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b b.  It’s a comforting age-old familiar sound, which marks the time when we first came to language and adopted it as ours.

Similarly, it’s probable that ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ is so attractive and so hackneyed precisely because it is liberating codswallop which allows us to insert our own meanings and make the words our own. It means nothing and so speaks to us all. Just as there may be method in madness, there is always some vital sense in nonsense.