Lippard.Multics 1985-11-12 15:46:32 mst Tue
Subject:  Green Ideas
Date:  Tuesday, 12 November 1985 15:37 mst
From:  Ron Barstad <RBarstad>
To:  {mbx >udd>m>jjl>misc>misc}

The following is proof that you don't have to be a human to write
stuff that is funny or twisted.


Date: Wed 30 Oct 85 23:02:50-PST
From: Paul Roberts <ROBERTS@SU-SUSHI.ARPA>
Subject: Colourless Green Ideas

         [Excerpted from the Stanford bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]

For the Literary competition set on Christmas Eve you were asked to compose
not more than 100 words of prose, or 14 lines of verse, in which a sentence
described as grammatically acceptable but without meaning did, in the event,
become meaningful.  The sentence, devised by Noam Chomsky, was:

colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

[...]  Competitors rose to this challenge good-humouredly and in force....


 It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn
to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown
papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them.  It is a marvel
to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate
within to give us the sudden  awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs.
  While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas
sleep furiously.

                C. M. Street


Behold the pent-up power of the winter tree;
Leafless it stands, in lifeless slumber.
Yet its very resting is revival and renewal:
Inside the dark gnarled world of trunk and roots,
Cradled in the chemistry of cell and sap,
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
In deep and dedicated doormancy,
Concentrating, conserving, constructing:
Knowing, by some ancient quantum law
Of chlorophyll and sun
That come the sudden surge of spring,
Dreams become reality, and ideas action.

                Bryan O. Wright


Let us think on them, the Twelve Makers
Of myths, trailblazing quakers
Scourging earthshakers
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
Before their chrysalides open curiously
Anarchy burgeons spuriously
Order raises new seedlings in the world
By word and gun upheld
The scarlet banner is unfurled
The New Country appears
Man loosens his fears
The New Dawn nears
Recollect our first fathers
The good society in momentum gathers.

                ("recently discovered sonnet by Alexander Blok")
                translated by Edward Black

[...]


(and the winner:)
(got 50 lbs.)

Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
Colour-rampant fowers, trees a myriad green;
Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
One apple later, he looks curiously
At the gardens of dichromates, in whom
colourless green ideas sleep furiously
then rage for birth each morning, until doom
Brings rainbows they at last perceive.

                D. A. H. Byatt