Colourless Green Thoughts.. “Colourless green thoughts sleep furiously, while the hay makes sun through the fire in the heights of the ocean.” Grammatically the sentence is absolutely correct. There is no spelling mistakes. Yet there was no meaning that could be ascribed to the sentence. The sentence is traditionally defined as a word or group of words that expresses a complete idea and that includes a subject and a verb. The above sentence had all the ingredients of a sentence except “expresses a complete idea”. This is the most important thing in a sentence. If the sentence does not express an idea it is meaningless, no matter how grammatically correct it is and if all spellings are correct. Many of us can write on and on filling volumes of paper without actually conveying anything, while some of us can convey a lot in a small sentence or a paragraph. This is an art which has to be developed with practice. Conveying maximum content with minimum words is what we should aim at. Now whenever I see someone writing some long passage which could be conveyed in a few paragraphs, I remember “Colourless green thoughts….”
Posted on: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 11:01:05 +0000
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