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Comment by lisper | Hacker News Reader

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo...

If we remove the adjectives formed from proper nouns, turn the nouns into "people", turn the verbs into "bully", and add a pronoun and an adjective, we get

    people whom other people bully bully people.

This makes sense.

But when we remove the pronoun and adjective and we get

    people people bully bully people

which is as far I can tell gibberish (without changing meanings such that they don't correspond with the original sentence). It can't have anything to do with many people persons, because in the original there's an adjective there.

If we assume that, just as there are social adept people, whom we call "people people", there are also socially adept buffalo called "buffalo buffalo", we can get "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo". But to go beyond that is to claim an incoherent sentence missing many words is coherent and grammatical.

It seems to me that if you replace "whom other" with "that" you end up with a similar meaning:

    people that people bully bully people

I've found it fairly common to hear people drop the "that" when speaking - so in this case:

    people people bully...

the first people refers to the people being bullied while the second people refers to the people doing the bullying. It's a bit clearer if you replace some of the nouns - for instance:

    dogs people bully bully cats

which I believe is a perfectly legal English sentence.

dogs people bully bully cats

Aha! It finally makes sense. Thanks.

You should edit the wikipedia article, because your explanation is way better than the one contained therein.

"Buffalo buffalo" is supposed to indicate "buffalo from Buffalo", the place.

And "people people bully bully people" makes sense to me if I think about it, although it doesn't sound natural due to the word repetition.

Maybe "people others bully bully others"?

Wikipedia has a good interpretation:

[Those] buffalo(es) from Buffalo [that are intimidated by] buffalo(es) from Buffalo intimidate buffalo(es) from Buffalo.

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