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The garden-path sentence effect occurs when the sentence has a phrase or word with an ambiguous meaning that the reader interprets in a certain way and, when they read the whole sentence, there is a difference in what has been read and what was expected. The reader must then read and evaluate the sentence again to understand its meaning.
One well known example, [17] for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading). Enter QUINCE for the Prologue Prologue If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, But with good will. To show our simple skill,
Palindrome: a word or phrase that reads the same in either direction; Pangram: a sentence which uses every letter of the alphabet at least once; Tautogram: a phrase or sentence in which every word starts with the same letter; Caesar shift: moving all the letters in a word or sentence some fixed number of positions down the alphabet
Sam has read the paper. – Statement b. Has Sam read the paper? – Yes–no question formed using inversion. Here the subject is Sam, and the verb has is an auxiliary. In the question, these two elements change places (invert). If the sentence does not have an auxiliary verb, this type of simple inversion is not possible.
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
The expression is thought to have originated with the Bloods, a gang that originated in Los Angeles, who wanted to avoid using "crazy" because it started with the letter "c," which they associated ...
Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2] (as an imperative) Measure the speed of flies like you would measure the speed of an arrow—i.e. (You should) time ...
In an article titled "Current Notes" in the February 9, 1885, edition, the phrase is mentioned as a good practice sentence for writing students: "A favorite copy set by writing teachers for their pupils is the following, because it contains every letter of the alphabet: 'A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. ' " [1] Dozens of other ...