I was checking whether a Greg Egan story is available for free anywhere online (legally!), so I entered its first sentence into Google. That first sentence is “The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away.”
Interestingly, Google returned three instances of this sentence that are, as near as I can tell, of unrelated provenance. That is, none is a quotation of any of the others or of a common source.
The longer a sentence is, the less likely it is to be created independently by multiple authors in an exactly identical form. I wonder how unusual it is for a sentence with eight words (such as the Egan sentence above) to have three independent authors.
This suggests a sort of Google-game. Try to come up with a long sentence with as many independent authors as you can find. What is the longest sentence with three independent authors?
Of course, there will be difficult cases. Maybe an author had read one of the earlier authors and inadvertently plagiarized them. That might have happened with the Egan sentence above. Still, I’m curious, can anyone beat eight words with three authors? By how much?
Not an entry but an anecdote, my brother’s wife used the phrase “The sun is a gigantic nuclear furnace” without having heard the TMBG song, which I found weird as it is her and my brother’s genre.
[/hijack]
I think that the TMBG lyric goes “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace.” So your sister-in-law’s phrase is not an exact quote. However, googling it does turn up five apparently-independent exact quotes.
But it’s only seven words ;).
A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.
Content matters; some long sentences are likely to be common, while others of equal length less so. I’ll wager your example has been used in hundreds of news stories over the past century.
I hadn’t heard of that story, but there’s a nice dramatization of it here:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qQKYBzLgaM
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQHhHrButms
Google News returns no hits. Which is strange, because the two non-Egan instances appeared in news articles, but I guess they weren’t in papers indexed by Google News.
But even taking into account the fact that some sentences will be more common than others, what’s the longest you can get?
In keeping with your theme of explosions, I tried: “The sky was lit up for miles around.”
**8 **independent hits, although some of those are clauses and not independent sentences.
Nice. Beats mine. Although, strangely, when I followed your link, I only saw six hits.
The explosion shattered windows hundreds of metres away.
I am surprised that particular sentence is that rare.
First, the word “the”, that is common as heck. If you pick the word explosion, what word are going to put in front of it? There arent many choices here.
Explosion. This is what you are going to talk about. Many words are subjects you are going to talk about. Talking about explosions isnt that rare.
Then windows. The explosion most likely did something to something. Windows seems a likely thing explosions affect/effect.
What did the explosion do to the windows? Shatter, again IMO is a fairly likely result. How many other words would reasonably take the place of shatter here?
After windows, whats next? A period or some other continuing descriptor? How far the explosion affected windows seems, again IMO, among a fairly short list of expected descriptors.
Now that we are talking about distance, what do we expect? Meters vs feet vs something vague like “for a good distance”.
While the OP’s wondering how rare any given sentence of some length COULD be, which is also interesting IMO, again IMO I am quite surprised this particular one is as RARE as the OP apparently found it to be.
“William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon” yields 13,500 hits (if you include omitted results).
I just did a search with Google’s Book Search for the sentence “The explosion shattered windows hundreds of meters away.” Two hits came back. One was just the Egan story that started all this. Tantalizingly, the other was from a book called Victims: Webster’s Quotations, Facts and Phrases, but Google isn’t letting me view the actual quote. I’m getting the message “[ Sorry, this page’s content is restricted ]”.
Weird: I only get 16 hits when I follow your link. Maybe I have some automatic setting to remove similar links.
But even among those 16, many are obviously quotes of one another.