One of my favorite terms is “insider baseball” which basically means stuff that’s only of interest to people obsessed with minutiae (e.g. most any sports insider, collectors, etc.)
Ironically, not many people outside the baseball community seem to know it’s meaning or have even heard it used.
Can anybody else think of any other phrases like this that are examples of themselves?
I’d like to help, but… I avoid clichés like the plague
“short phrase”
Sesquipedalianism.
… Dammit, that was going to be my example.
TLA
Three letter acronym.
ETLA
Extended three letter acronym
This is a sentence.
Actually, I hear it very frequently on political shows, as a synonym for “Inside the Beltway,” which is pretty much only heard on political shows (with that meaning, anyway), and so may be a better example.
“sentence fragment”
Word.
“Brevity is…wit”
(seen on a banner on an episode of The Simpsons)
“is a quine”
A post which has eight words in it.
This.
6210001000
A 10 digit number which tells you how many times each of the 10 digits appear in the number, starting with 0 and ending with 9.
0123456789
6 - 0 appears 6 times in the number
2 - 1 appears 2 times in the number
1 - 2 appears 1 time in the number
1 - 6 appears 1 time in the number
You must give advice!
The next statement is false.
The previous statement is true.
Douglas Hofstadter is obsessed with self referential statements. Read all about it in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the Eternal Golden Braid. The most famous is the mathematical self referential statement that is the basis of the proof of Gödel’s Theorem. My favorite, however, is:
I just looked it up, it is worded slightly differently: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
When Martin Gardner retired from writing his Mathematical Games column for Scientific American, Hofstadter took it over with a new column called “Metamagical Themas” (which was quickly discovered to be an anagram of Mathematical Games). Even then, he was obsessed with self-referential themes of the sort that he was obsessed with, being obssessed with them as he was. It became clear rather quickly that he was a one-trick pony, and his column didn’t last long.
Alliteration is a succession of similar sounds.
So Says,
Shodan