In Search of the Perfect Garden Path Sentence

Making sense (and nonsense) out of the world's most devious sentences.

Happy England, by Helen Allingham (Via British Museum)

The best garden path sentences rely on one of two tricks to garden-path¹ you: 1) Noun/verb ambiguity. And 2) Unmarked relative clauses. 

It’s all terribly devious, but with just these two devices, you can throw an unsuspecting sentence-reader into a sea of madness and confusion, leaving them sprawling in terror and disbelief as the sentence they thought they were reading careens right over the edge of a cliff. My favorite garden path sentence does this in just five words:

The old man the boat.  

“What on earth …” (says our befuddled sentence-reader, spitting out a cheroot as a monocle ejects itself forcefully from their eye socket) “… is this terrible old man ‘the boating,’ and how does any man, young or old, ‘the boat’ in the first place?” The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t—the only thing anyone is doing in this famous garden path sentence is “manning,” and it’s the old who are doing it to the boat. This is a classic case of noun/verb ambiguity (one does not expect “man” as a verb, especially when it follows “old”), and it’s devastatingly effective. 

But there is still more mischief to be made with our second garden path device. The most effective garden path sentence of this type manages it in just four words:

Fat people eat accumulates. 

“What …” (blusters our comically disoriented sentence-reader, who is still with us despite the near-constant abuse) “… are ‘accumulates,’ and why would anyone eat them?” This is where we gleefully point out that we really have done everything we possibly could to prepare them for an unmarked relative clause such as “[that] people eat,” so we can hardly be blamed for the confusion. 

Almost all the other well-known garden path sentences rely on one or both of these devices to achieve their effect. There’s the old standby about the unlikely horse:

The horse raced past the barn fell.

The strange saga of the whistling man: 

The man who whistles tunes pianos. 

And the surprising fact about cotton: 

The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi.

These are all well and good, and they’ve served as avatars of the garden path sentence for so long that no one seems to know where most of them came from in the first place. But can we do better? And by better, I mean, worse. I’d like to propose a three-pronged attack that can lead us beyond the safety of the garden path and deep into a treacherous jungle that will test our long-suffering sentence-reader to the very limit. 

First, we will enhance the noun/verb confusion by finding words that naturally flow together. In “Predicting Garden Path Sentences,” Robert William Milne observes that a garden path scenario is much more likely if the reader naturally associates the subject of the noun phrase with the verb, so “The postman delivered junk mail threw it in the trash” will garden path you, but “The tenant delivered junk mail threw it in the trash” will not. 

Next, we will string together relative clauses in a row in order to mesmerize our reader, so that they wander further and further into the dangerous thickets of our sentence. Milne further shows how effective it can be to place multiple “buffers” between the trickster phrase and its conclusion, as in “The building blocks the sun shining on the house faded are red” (which’ll stop our hapless reader in their tracks, while “The building blocks are red” might just cause them to stumble). And in “Garden Path Phenomena and the Grammatical Basis of Language Processing,” Bradley L. Pritchett shows how even marked relative clauses can do quite a bit of mischief, as in the sentence “The patient persuaded the doctor that he was having trouble with to leave.”

Finally, we will use semantic satiation to bewilder and enrage our reader. By repeating certain words and phrases in different contexts, we can knock them off balance during the weak points in the sentence (any transition between clauses) that might normally allow them to regain the thread of meaning.

Thus, I present to you five nasty, wicked, treacherous, and absolutely cursed Jungle Track™ sentences. Read them at your peril! 

1. The business people like left fat people wanting for nothing wanted for the firm ship the young man.²

2. The firm friends run can can the firm friends the poor saw run the poor firm poorly.³

3. The wheat toast's usually made of flowers with pine people growing flowers toast for toast people pine for.⁴

4. The singles bar gold bars that single sold bar one single bar the singles bar blocks, but singles bar sold gold blocks anyway.⁵ 

5. The bear hammers bears order hammer bears bears order hammered and hammered bears bear hammered bear bear hammer orders.⁶ 

Thank you. I’ll be here all night.

1. “Garden path” is often used as a verb in the literature on the topic. I really like it. 

2. The business [that] people like left fat [that] people wanting for nothing wanted for the firm ship [that] the young [people] man.

3. The firm [that] friends run can can [fire] the firm friends [whom] the poor [people] saw run the poor firm poorly.

4. The wheat [that] toast’s usually made of flowers with [grows alongside] pine [that] people growing flowers [flower-growers] toast for toast [that] people pine for.

5. The singles [unattached people] bar [prohibit] gold bars that [that] single [unattached person] sold bar [except] one single bar [that] the singles bar blocks, but singles [unattached people] bar [prohibit] sold gold blocks [gold blocks that are sold] anyway.

6. The bear hammers [hammers for bears] [that] bears order hammer bears [whom] bears order [to be] hammered and hammered bears [bears who are hammered] bear [endure] bear hammer [hammers for bears] orders.