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On the marvelous achievement that is the “8-buffalo sentence,” and other equally wonderful stupidities.

As far as I can tell, the American bison has never bothered to majestically roam the plains of Buffalo, New York — probably because there’s not enough grass — which means that the idea of Buffalo buffalo, like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” will never be more than a wonderful fancy. But if there were Buffalo buffalo, and they were particularly ill-disposed towards the famous 8-buffalo sentence, you might have a situation where Buffalo buffalo buffalo “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” I think we can all agree that this would be rather nice. 

Publications of the Buffalo Historical Society 

Much like The Calculus, the 8-buffalo sentence seems to have been discovered contemporaneously by a few independent pioneers, but most accounts of its origin focus on the philosopher William J. Rapaport, who is, hilariously, an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Buffalo, and Dmitri Borgmann, a writer with a specialty in ludolinguistics (whimsically larking about with words), which is a good job if you can get it. Borgmann wrote two books on “recreational linguistics,” the second of which, Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought, contains a 4-buffalo sentence in a section on “Repetitive Homonymy.” 

BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO BUFFALO.

For anyone puzzled by this statement, we elaborate: “Wild oxen (roaming the streets) of Buffalo, New York bewilder (visiting) North Carolina coast dwellers.” 

Borgmann’s reference to Buffalo, North Carolina, tends to get excluded from the Buffalo-buffalo discourse, but it adds a bit more elegance to the eventual 8-buffalo sentence that can be built on this rock-solid 4-buffalo foundation. The other potentially confusing buffalo in the 4-buffalo sentence is the buffalo that means “bully,” “bewilder,” or “outwit.” “Buffalo” as a verb first appears in the U.S. in the early 1900s, presumably as a slang word derived from the inconsiderate tendency of buffalo herds to occasionally run one over. The October 5, 1904, edition of the New York Evening Post uses it in a fairly shady aside about President McKinley: 

All the rest [of the newspapers] were what we used to term in the Southwest ‘buffaloed’ by the McKinley myth — that is, silenced by the fear of incurring the resentment of a people taught to regard McKinley as a saint.

Once you have your bovine buffalo, your New York Buffalo, and your North Carolina Buffalo (or any of the other 29 Buffalos around the world), as well as your bewildering, bullying “buffalo,” v., the only other tool you need to construct a luxurious 8-buffalo-sentence is the concept of a reduced relative clause, which is a tendency in English to omit the relative pronoun in a phrase like “the ludolinguist I envied” (as opposed to “the ludolinguist whom I envied”). 

Now, like Rapaport and Borgmann before us, we can achieve the mythical octobuffalo, thus:

Buffalo (🗽) buffalo (🦬) Buffalo (🗽) buffalo (🦬) buffalo (👊🏻) buffalo (👊🏻) Buffalo (🏙) buffalo (🦬). Which is to say — in the silliest way possible — that Buffalo (NY) bison [whom] Buffalo (NY) bison bully, bewilder Buffalo (NC) bison.  

In his history of the concept, Rapaport theorizes about a seemingly impossible deca-buffalo, but it requires agreeing that there’s a type of bullying that’s only practiced in Buffalo and that “Buffalo buffalo” can mean “to Buffalo-bully someone” in the same way, I suppose, that you might French kiss someone (which is, at the very least, a more pleasant way to behave than these blighted Buffalo-buffaloing Buffalo buffalos).¹ 

There’s also an awful lot of dangerous nonsense out there² suggesting that you can have an infinite-buffalo sentence, which (if I understand it correctly) relies on the absurd notion that since “buffalo buffalo buffalo” is short for “buffalo whom buffalo buffalo,” you can get buffalos all the way down by positing “buffalo whom buffalo buffalo, whom buffalo buffalo, whom buffalo buffalo” ad infinitum, and then removing all the “whoms.” I will just say that these people need to get a hobby, English does not work this way, and we should all just try to enjoy the miraculous octo-buffalo that the good Lord has granted us. 

As it is, there is not much else in the world that is quite like the octo-buffalo, because there aren’t many words that can act as a plural noun, a transitive verb, and an adjective all at once, though if you accept that Police is a town in Poland (and the people of Police will be offended if you don’t), you could also perhaps slanderously claim that Police police Police police police police Police police. 

Setting aside the questionably motivated Polish constabulary, our octo-buffalo is unique amongst the most notorious attempts to make coherent strings of one word, in that it doesn’t ask for any help from elsewhere in the dictionary. Which is to say that it begins and ends with “buffalo,” with nothing but “buffalo” in between, like a breadless buffalo sandwich. But non-purists will enjoy Martin Gardner’s 21 consecutive “and”s in the following sentence:

Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?

And — provided you’re willing to be lenient with a slightly suspicious semicolon — there’s plenty to recommend the venerable example of James, who (unlike his brainbox school chum John) absolutely beefed it when asked to identify the past perfect of the word “had”:

James, while John had had “had had,” had had “had”; "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher.

But like the majestic bison³, who famously roam on what sounds like an absolutely crackerjack range where “never is heard a discouraging word,” the octo-buffalo is, deservedly, an American classic.

1. If you accept this premise (and if my buffalo-math is correct), this actually means that you can achieve an astonishing tetradeca-buffalo, viz.: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo-buffalo Buffalo-buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo-buffalo. I.e.,: 🗽🦬 [whom] 🗽🦬 🗽👊🏻 🗽👊🏻 🏙🦬 [whom] 🏙🦬 🗽👊🏻. Or, in slightly plainer English: Bison from Western New York whom other bison from Western New York Buffalo-bully, themselves Buffalo-bully bison from North Carolina whom other bison from North Carolina Buffalo-bully.

2. I think it all originates from ​​Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, a genuinely very fun textbook that uses buffalo sentences to illustrate formal logic.

3. I’m aware that these bad boys aren’t considered “true buffalo,” but it’s far too late in the game for me to grapple with that now, if I’m being honest.