What does "colorless green ideas sleep furiously mean"? The answer unveiled by a linguist from Ohio.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." 

This is a famous sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957. They say the sentence is syntactically correct but semantically incoherent. Well today I will shed a little of my own light onto the sentence. Of course our language has evolved from 1957, so the terms used back then are probably not the same terms we use today. Anyways, here it goes...

Looking at this sentence, we can see that it aligns with a correct syntax for English. Semantically though, we are a little puzzled. I am going to hopefully explain how I can put this sentence into a context that is semantically understandable in English.


I will first start with the synonymous definition for each term:

Colorless = nondiscriminatory by race, raceless, unbiased

Green = Environmentally friendly

Ideas = ideas

Sleep = lie dormant 

Furiously = moving quickly with purpose

So what I propose:

 "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"
to mean
"Unbiased environmental friendly ideas lie dormant within us, trying to get out."

Can't you see it? We all have this furious idea within us that is just waiting to escape! We can't help it, we need to help save the environment unbiased of destination. Can you see it?

We need to start moving toward an environmentally friendly way to live with this earth, or else we could face serious consequences in the coming days. Certainly our generation will not be so impacted by the shifting of the environment, but generations to come will be greatly influenced by the natural world shift. 

Conclusion: 

I believe that nowadays in English we can use semantic similarities much easier because the language has evolved in the direction of a multiform-semantic use for a word. In other words, we can connect ideas much easier and quicker because we can be more lenient with how we define things and the internet carries new information at hyper speeds. We usually take words and ideas to be much more loosely defined than in the past. The constriction from the formal grammatical English is being lifted and we are seeing a massive shift in the flow of meaning. The syntax of English is not so quick to change though. It some cases there has been a shift but it is not big. I may have to discuss this in another post.

 English is on the rise semantically and evolving quickly, we can't do much but sit back and ride the out the tide. So let's create some new words while we are at it ;-).

For all you creative types out there: urbandictionary.com
-----> Go, Create, Enjoy

It dropped below -15F this winter. So stay warm friends! 

Any comments or questions or ideas? I'd love to hear them, so don't be shy! 

*I do not own any pictures in this post.