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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

I find it interesting that we have solid grammatical fixes for this problem in some cases, but not all. For example,

  The horse raced past the barn fell

should never be written like that. The fix is:

  The horse, raced past the barn, fell

But:

  The old man the boat

really can't be fixed, other than rearranging the sentence altogether.

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I concur about the grammatical fixes.

As a native British English speaker I didn't actually have any trouble parsing any of the sentences save for the "The horse raced past the barn fell" because it was written without the customary punctuational scaffolding.

'The old man the boat' seemed fine to me too, not sure why.

I'd be interested to hear if other British English folks had much trouble with these sentences. Perhaps it's a by product of being exposed to too many 'dad jokes' (Fruit flies like a banana) but perhaps it's a more general condition of British English humour that made me feel familiar with this type of sentence structure.

Sure, though a substantive adjective followed by a noun-verb homonym will almost always cause this phenomenon (to varying degrees):

The crooked defect home.

The hot lead the cold.

The quick pace themselves.

The wet tear off their wet clothes.

Nice examples. "Old man" is a much more common adjective/noun construct than "wet tear", "crooked defect", and maybe even "quick pace", though, so I think these are slightly easier to parse. But "hot lead" is excellent :-)

I don't know whether "the hot lead the cold" and "the wet tear off their clothes" are made easier, or harder, to parse by the fact that when one (or at least I) reads them, one assigns a pronunciation to the 3rd word en passant. (I picked correctly, as it turned out, so don't know how hard it is to overcome the effect of a wrong choice.)

> should never be written like that

In my view it's as valid as something like:

  The dog with the red nose died

which would never be written

  The dog, with the red nose, died

Just because it's not easy to parse doesn't mean there's a hard-and-fast rule about adding punctuation.

You add punctuation like you add pauses: to aid understanding.

I'm not sure I would add pauses when saying "the horse raced past the barn died"... mainly because in real life there'd be enough context to parse it properly. These sentences are just very artificial examples.

> The horse, raced past the barn, fell

But that changes the meaning. Consider a situation where you have two horses. One of them has been raced past the barn; the other never has. This matters because inside the barn there is an alien artefact emitting radiation that weakens the muscles. But that was yesterday. Today you have sent both horses out for another canter -- and one of them has suffered a fall. Tell me, Igor, which one was it? Did the radiation from the alien artefact cause the trouble? "The horse raced past the barn fell."

But the version with the commas is only applicable when (1) you already know which horse is being referred to and (2) the fall happens in racing past the barn or at least as an immediate consequence, it seems to me.

> For example,

> > The horse raced past the barn fell

> should never be written like that.

Surely it can, and must, be so written if the thing past which the horse raced was, as Wikipedia mentions, "the fell by or at the barn"?

> The old man the boat

When spoken aloud, this is easier to understand. A fluent English speaker will be able to put the emphasis in the proper places.

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