"Why was the scarecrow given an award?"
"He was out standing in his field."
The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.
Wikipedia attributes the joke to an 1847 article, which is phrased in a way that clearly isn't intended to have some deeper meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_...
To make the square you'd have to do something where the context of "the other side" means past life into death. e.g., "Why did the spiritualist put his ear towards the road? To hear from the other side."
I don’t know how to make the chicken crossing the road use this meaning, but … well, there it is.
You might have taken this as a hint?
"Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.
The success of that initiative remains to be seen.
Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound:
(Fruit) (flies) (like a banana)
(Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)
To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.
No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know
As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences
There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation
Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.
It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?
Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfl...