Ewww, that smell. Can you not smell that smell?
What are some groups of 3 words or more that can be combined in any order to create valid sentences?
[Moderating]
This isn’t really about the arts, but it does make for a decent Thread Game. Moving.
Live, Laugh, Love
Does a cheesy slogan qualify as a sentence? I don’t honestly think it matters much if the order is changed from standard.
Those are all independent clauses, though.
You can essentially have an infinite number of independent clauses which consist of a single verb with an understood subject and the order will likely be irrelevant. (Barring putting “die” or something similar in there where one action will prevent a subsequent action from occurring.)
Yeah, you can do this at different degrees of difficulty e.g.
The sentence must have a subject or object as well as a verb (or both)
No names
No implied dialogue
No homographs of any kind - i.e. if I use “lead” to mean the metal in the first combination, I can’t use it as a verb in a subsequent combination
I don’t think you can do it without allowing yourself to leave out at least one of the above restrictions.
It’s not as though I’m the first in the thread to present sentences that have multiple clauses in them, and the OP doesn’t rule it out.
A bigger objection to ‘Live, laugh, love’ would be that there is a sort of established vowel order for English phrases like this - we have ping-pong, dilly-dally and zig-zag, but pong-ping, dally-dilly and zag-zig all sound wrong.
Thank you! They don’t sound wrong to me - I now have THREE snappy rejoinders for when I’m accusing of puttering about apparently aimlessly from one project to another.
Initially I was thinking about proper sentences with real words, but it’s also interesting to see all the solutions people come up with. English is flexible enough that it makes for some unconventional solutions. Like the buffalo one. With names and places, pretty much any word can be a name, so they enable a lot of flexibility. I’m not sure that I would think of names as words exactly. The solution above that used the proper words (you, look, there) was more in line what I was initially thinking about. If this was a contest or something, I suspect there would have to be a degree of difficulty applied depending on what sorts of words and sentences the solution entailed.
I feel like there is a solution that is just evading me, using words that change type depending on the setting.
‘leaves’ for example, means ‘departs’, or the things that grow on trees.
Polish and polish. Refuse and refuse.
Polish leaves fly (the leaves in Poland are flying through the air)
Fly, Polish leaves!
Leaves polish fly (the leaves make an insect very shiny)
Fly leaves polish (it departs when it has been thoroughly shined)
Polish fly leaves; (to clarify, the fly that left was itself from Poland)
Leaves fly polish (to clarify further, the fly left the place where it was being polished)
OK, I’m not happy with that last one because it is a fragment, but pretty close I think.
The Leaves Family, originally from Warsaw, are returning to the homeland for vacation and have decided to fly LOT from London to Warsaw. So…Leaves fly Poland (the headline of the very small newspaper that finds out.)
This, I think, is the key limiting factor, but it’s a weird one.
Certainly ‘polish’ (the substance) is a different word from ‘Polish’ (the nationalty), but is it really a different word from ‘polish’(v)- the verb meaning to apply polish(n)?
Yeah.
I think insofar as they don’t fit in the same grammatical structure they probably are different words at some level, (i.e. to give a polish is different from giving some polish - I can’t quite come with a sentence where I can keep everything else identical and just replace polish with polish). However for the purposes of this game I think it has to be fair enough.
Contrast however: “I gave him a tap” which works whether I merely want his attention or am supplying him with plumbing materials. Is “tap” one word or two?
I suppose it comes down to whether you define a word as a referent to some idea or concept (in which case “tap” is two* words that happen to look/sound the same) or as a distinct sound/sequence of letters in which case “tap” is one word which refers to two* things.
*Or more
Time flies like an arrow
‘tap’ is an especially interesting one because the plumbing term ‘tap’ (USA: faucet) derives from the taps that were hammered (literally tapped ) into wooden barrels to access the contents, so tap(the water thing) is a nouned form of the verb tap(to strike)
I think the game probably needs to permit these (and maybe all homographs) in order to be playable at all.
Nice to hear the classics again!
Names like these also allow for 4-word sets since they can also be location names. For example, take the sentence “Gomer, bully Mayberry Goober.” Here, the word “Mayberry” is used to uniquely identify the Goober who lives in Mayberry from all the other Goobers who live in nearby towns. From the list of names in your post, these people names are also city names:
- Chase, PA
- Hector, MN
- Mark, IL
- Pierce, NE
The set (Chase/Hector/Mark/Pierce) enables sentences of the same form, like “Chase, hector Mark Pierce”, where “Mark Pierce” means the person named Pierce who is from Mark, IL.