Colorless green ideas

When Chomsky made the sentence ''Colorless green ideas sleep furiously," he was illustrating through a sample how a string of language that we have not heard before can be produced by a speaker following the application of some governing rules or universal grammar. Whether a deep structure like this exists or not has been the subject of intense debate for decades, a complex controversy that I have neither the time nor the expertise to be involved with in a brief blog entry. What interests me here, other than the fact that a string like that can even be produced, is the way it reminds me of similar weird-sounding sentences or lines in literature.

In general, a sentence like ‘’Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’’ belongs to what we can dismiss as a member of the class of "nonsense" utterances, about which an anthology such as the one by Carolyn Wells exists. Again, broadly speaking, this type of nonsense also belongs to that sub-set which uses an "orthodox'' syntax and known lexis, distinguished from the second sub-set which no longer does. Among the known lines in Literature we can range under these two sets would be Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" which uses a familiar syntax with known and unknown words. We can argue that, despite the difficulty in determining the precise meaning of some new words and lines in the ''poem,'' anyone would still be able to recover some nonverbal meaning conveyed by the rhythms and sound effects of the piece, the same way that music does even in the absence of words. This allows the possibility to organize contests to ''semanticize'' the famous Chomskian sample. No matter how senseless it may be, some meanings can still be read into it, even if it may count as ''over reading'' (since the sentence is not of common usage).

However, what counts as weird or unfamiliar in language may just be a function of its currency in a given community or historical situation. I bet many people will also find English sentences as used in the 16th century weird or difficult to read, even nonsensical. We could also say the same thing to the varieties of English spoken around the world. There are expressions and vocabulary that an Englishman may use that an Australian may not understand, or vice versa. In short, we don't even need to go into Literature to look for weird sounding expressions because weirdness is a relative quality that is independent of any grammar, universal or not.

If we want to count all the weird expressions in a language, we may well be forced to include the majority of metaphors in everyday and literary domains. And in so far as all of language is metaphorical in nature whose weirdness had been forgotten (conceptual metaphors in Lakoff, etc.), we can even say that language itself by its very catachretic constitution, at the very bottom (or root, or any other figure that we may want to use), is informed by weirdness. It is no wonder that ostranenie or ''defamiliarization,'' by foregrounding once more this forgotten dimension of language, became a central defining technique of the ''poetic'' in the 20th century for literary criticism. The production of weird, unfamiliar language became the chief signature by which we could sense the presence of the poetic or the literary.

Of course, this is not a fool proof criterion. ''Context,'' this abstract term which we use to name all the known and unknown variables that inform the meaning of events, may not really serve as a default court of appeal since it is also unfortunately as unstable as any other scaffolding for semantic closure. However, for contrasts, it does help us understand why one expression in one time or place may sound weird or common in another. Defamiliarization is context-sensitive, so to speak. It is indeed conceivable for a writer or speaker to target a domain of expression that has the widest demographic denominator to maximize the impact of ostranenie. Some ''coinage'' have become common usage, and many others remained unable to attain this linguistic pleasure. (Just look at Shakespeare.) ''Transparent language'' is just a more epistemically-loaded way of labeling familiar and commonly used expressions. That is why we find it disturbing yet amusing when Ionesco or Beckett progressively deprives these common everyday expressions of sense in their Absurdist works.

Going back a little further, I recall Breton and the surrealists using a similar procedure of juxtaposition of incongruous terms. Look at some of the lines from ''Union libre ou Ma femme.'' 

Ma femme à la chevelure de feu de bois

Aux pensées d'éclairs de chaleur

A la taille de sablier

Ma femme à la taille de loutre entre les dents du tigre

Ma femme à la bouche de cocarde et de bouquet d'étoiles de

dernière grandeur

Aux dents d'empreintes de souris blanche sur la terre blanche

A la langue d'ambre et de verre frottés

Ma femme à la langue d'hostie poignardée

A la langue de poupée qui ouvre et ferme les yeux

A la langue de pierre incroyable...

If you jumble up all the things the wife is being likened to, it would be a monstrous thing. The wife here becomes a field of intersection in language, following the surrealist aesthetic of incongruous juxtaposition. This free union simply enacts the same process by which linguistic elements are conjoined to produce speech, only symbolically exaggerated to foreground and to contrast it with the constrained set of union we have come to know as transparent and literalized language. Capable of being described by any metaphorical set, the object ''wife'' suddenly becomes indescribable. André Breton writes:

[T]hese elements are, on the surface, as strange to you as they are to anyone else, and naturally you are wary of them. Poetically speaking, what strikes you about them above all is their extreme degree of immediate absurdity, the quality of this absurdity, upon closer scrutiny, being to give way to everything admissible, everything legitimate in the world: the disclosure of a certain number of properties and of facts no less objective, in the final analysis, than the others...

We don't need to subscribe to the underpinning ideas of surrealist psychology to visibly appreciate the effects of defamiliarization in these ''poetic abuses'' of (an already catachretic) language. Quoting Reverdy, Breton explains for us the mechanics behind this linguistic weirdness: ''The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be -- the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.''

Whatever radicalized form or method writing may take on today (well over the eroded notions of powerful ''images'', ''emotions'', or ''poetic reality''), it would still remind us of this primary combinatory process, even if it pushes us beyond the very substance of language itself in all its orthodox formations and conceptualizations. What may be closest could have taken us so far, and what is so familiar could in the end be a stranger we have met by chance.