Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, don’t they?

“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” is Noam Chomsky’s classic example of a grammatical sentence that doesn’t compute, his way of demonstrating that the human brain processes linguistic information in several ways at the same time. But if we fiddle with Chomsky’s sentence, we can show that the English language is perhaps more flexible than is dreamt of in Noam’s philosophy.

Green ideas, for instance, are far from new. Andrew Marvell was at it back in the 17th century, with his “Thoughts in a Garden,” which includes this famous stanza:

Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.

Colorless green ideas? How about “Seen in the cold light of day, Mr. Vanneman’s vaunted green ideas appear quite colorless.” Sleeping ideas? That’s easy. “The idea of Christian unity, which has slept for centuries, appears to be wakening.” Sleeping furiously? That’s tougher. But how about “He collapsed on the floor and fell at once into a furious sleep”?

Put together in a single sentence, the inconsistencies in the connotations of these words are too abrupt and too frequent—they bang into each other so hard that it’s impossible to smooth them out into a single metaphor. But take them one at a time, and you can do better.