Misleading Trails

Two weeks ago, I ended my newsletter article with this quote:

And if you haven’t heard it before, you most likely had one of the following facial reactions:

🤔, 😳, 🥴

That sentence features a particular type of linguistic wordplay. It’s what’s referred to as a Garden Path Sentence.

You can think of these sentences as the verbal equivalent of optical illusions. You think you’re seeing one thing, but you’re actually seeing something else.

The name “Garden Path” brings to mind a leisurely stroll down familiar territory. That is, until you reach a dead end. All garden path sentences have the same structure: using grammatical ambiguity, they mislead you into thinking the sentence is taking on one form—until you’re far enough into reading it that you realize you were wrong.

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana” is a great example. One reads the first half, “Time flies like an arrow,” and thinks, “Ah, time is the subject, flies is the verb, and we’re looking at a simile due to the word like.” But alas, the second half proves you were way off. The parallelism between the two parts forces us to reassess the sentence and realize that time flies was in fact the subject, like was the verb, and there is no simile at play.

The mind is easily fooled, isn’t it?

Other Examples

Here are some of my favorite garden path sentences:

• The old man the boat.

  • This one doesn’t even seem like it should be allowed to exist in English. Where’s the verb? But it is grammatically correct. You’ve just been heading down the wrong garden path.

• The horse raced past the barn fell.

  • How about that unexpected fell at the end there? A perfectly good sentence, ruined by a perfectly unexpected word… Except that it’s still a perfectly good sentence.

• The florist sent the flowers was pleased.

  • Who did the sending and who did the receiving?

• This xkcd comic

And here’s one that, although not really a garden path sentence, is just an all-around great example of convoluted wordplay:

Steve, where Bob had had 'had', had had 'had had'; had had had had a better effect on the instructor.

Not Just Words

In music, there exist songs that have confusing or misleading rhythmic or harmonic structures, akin to garden path sentences. We can think of them as garden path songs. You believe the artist is leading you one way, until…

A classic is Drive My Car by the Beatles. Count along with the intro. It seems to be just one beat too long:

Or Little Secrets by Passion Pit, whose intro misleadingly includes a short rest. The drums that kick in 5 seconds in are surprising:

In each of these cases, the song seems to establish some rhythmic direction that our minds grasp on to, thereby making the reveal jarring. Just like with the garden path sentences. And just like with the duck/rabbit.

Like I said before: The mind is easily fooled.

Final word goes to the Pointer Sisters, who wrote this classic number counting song for Sesame Street. For any music enthusiasts, I challenge you to figure out what is happening rhythmically in this song.