The landlord of a pub called The Pig And Whistle asked a sign writer to make a new sign. When he saw it he thought that the words were too close together, so he said to the sign writer “I want more space between Pig and And and And and Whistle”.
Inspired by the story, another landlord decides to name their pub “Pig and And and And and Whistle.” Lo and behold, the sign was cramped… Ther needed more space between Pig and and and and and And and And and and and and and And and And and and and and and Whistle.
You shut your whore mouth.
Buffalo buffalo, Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
I think you or they added two extra ands, because the pub isn’t “Pig And And Whistle.”
Space between pig and and, and space between and and whistle
Yes but they have two too many, go count it.
No, more space between Pig & And + And & Whistle.
(Pig and And) and (And and Whistle)
Ah see this one makes more sense but since it is a single sentence clause two of them are still redundant.
They refer to the same and twice.
then it should be separated by comma after the first and and
I don’t believe that’s accurate.
There are only two things in the list, pig & whistle.
They want more space between pig and &.
They also want more space between & and whistle.
If we were listing three areas where they want additional space we would need at least one comma, and I would argue for the Oxford comma as well, however we are only listing two areas where we want more space and so no comma is needed.
Sure it’s nearly unreadable, but I think the punctuation is correct.
If the same and is referred to twice then it should be a separate sentence clause requiring use of a comma. Since there is no comma there is no indication the and is the same both times.
Imagine saying “It was just me and dave and dave went driving” instead of “It was just me and dave, and dave went driving.” Yeah, maybe its the same dave, possibly readable, but its wrong.
It is indeed a very convoluted way of making the requests. I would say more space between each word.
Nah, it’s referring to the first space by grouping the first and second words, “Pig” and “And,” and then referring to the second space by grouping the second and third words, “And” and “Whistle.”
They said and “And” and “And” and “Whistle” tho, thats 2 extra.
“The Pig And Whistle” asked a sign writer to make a new sign.
I want more space between “Pig” and “And”
and
[more space between] “And” and “Whistle”
Ovahea’s comment as I copy and paste is
Pig and And and And and Whistle”.
So if you remove the bonus ands, it becmes “Pig And And Whistle”.
But as someone else pointed out it’s the same “and”. The sign has three words on it. Between the words are spaces. How many spaces are there? What on either edge of each space?
Okay I concede that it works, albeit it requires a comma, but it also works without the redundant ands
“Pig and Whistle” is what they’re asking for.
Pig
.
And
.
Whistle
But they gave instructions for “Pig And And Whistle” in the comment I replied to.
Pig & And, And & whistle. It’s focusing on the conjunctive. ’And’ is repeated because it is pertinent in both phrases.
More space between pig and and as well as between and and whistle.
Yeah thats a proper sentence but thats not what was written above.
Live footage of me reviewing a report that has a repeated word series like this:
I showed my teacher a flork and now she loves them
Hahaha holy shit, some of them are way the fuck out there
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
You can create a sentence with an infinite number of “police”
Who polices the Police?
Police Police police Police.
Who polices the Police Police?
Police Police Police police Police Police.
And so on…
* the sound of buffalos approaching *
Plot twist: There is no police police. ACAB
Who polices the Police?
Police Police police Police.
Who polices the Police Police?
Someone called👮😎
Same with “truck”: https://youtu.be/kccONko4xYE?si=z0Y3_lLN87nMrJIp
Who polices the Police?
🤷 Coastguard?
James, while John had had “had”, had had “had had;” “had had” had had a greater effect on the teacher.
😠
You must be loving all the technically correct comments on this post
I came here to post this, it’s my favorite sentence in the English language. Although imo it makes more sense if you switch your “while” for a “where”.
In German the following is a completely valid sentence:
Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen nach.
Which translates to when flies fly behind flies, then flies follow flies. The same works for seals:
Wenn hinter Robben Robben Robben, robben Robben Robben nach.
Some Hungarian prefixes can be piled on without limit, while still creating meaning.
The word “úszni” means “to swim”.
Úsztatni - to make someone or someone swim
Úsztattatni - to make someone make someone swim
Úsztattattattattattattattattattni - to make someone make someone make someone … make someone swimCan be done with any verb, and maybe some other suffixes as well.
Wow, that’s wild. Amazing language
It’s basically a mishmash of Ancient Ugric, Turkish, German, Slavic and Romani words with grammar that is an eldritch monstrosity, nobody really knows where it came from, and it is seriously weird.
There are only two real tenses, but nineteen cases and two different ways of doing imperative, which are kind of equivalent but carry cultural and tonal differences in certain contexts.
Strangely enough, this works in Finnish too:
Uida - to swim
Uittaa - to make someone or something swim
Uitattaa - to make someone make someone swim
Uitattattattattattattattattattaa - to make someone make someone make someone … make someone swim
It’s almost as if they are related languages or something.
English has Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo
I don’t know what it means but I’ve been told it is indeed a full sentence.
Bison from Buffalo, New York bully bison from Buffalo, New York who bully other bisons.
There are no buffalo in Buffalo!
The same works in Dutch:
Als vliegen achter vliegen vliegen, vliegen vliegen vliegen achterna.
Although my favourite form of that tongue twister is:
Als vliegende vliegen achter vliegende vliegen vliegen, vliegen de vliegende vliegen vliegensvlug.
When flying flies fly behind flying flies, the flying flies fly rapidly (“flying fast”).
You can say “fleetly” instead of “rapidly”. Actually “rapidly” sounds incorrect when describing flying.
Wenn hinter Robben Robben robben, robben Robben Robben nach.
FTFY
“That that” can and probably should be replaced with “that which” in almost every instance it is used.
Edit: or “when that”
Many times you don’t need the first “that” at all.
Did you know that I play soccer?
Vs
Did you know I play soccer?
That is both true and less “demonstrative”.
I’m surprised that that is your opinion.
Put that in your thatwhich and eat it ;).
It annoys me so much when I feel I need to write a sentence like that that I go to great lengths to restructure sentences to avoid it.
…fuck
Your grammar and sanity are better for it. Actually, most cases I’m which a double that is used you can probably get away with a single that.
It is true that that is almost never necessary.
“It is true that that’s almost never necessary.”
I can’t wrap my head around this, logically it’s still a ‘double that’ but the short form makes it palatable to read/say.
“That that” spoken are two different sounding words so it makes sense. When it goes from verbal to written and I see it, I will almost always try to rephrase things to avoid that combo. It just jumps out as totally wrong.
are they? I just said “I didn’t know that that was how it is” out loud and both thats sound the same
The A is slightly more emphasized in the second that. It’s subtle
must be regional I guess
Could be. So you say them exactly the same and not an inflection shift?
No, why would I
Because you generally put more emphasis on the subject in English
I’ll try and pay attention next time I have to say that that or if someone else says it. I think reading it and over thinking it makes it sound weird
I think it depends on if you want to emphasize something specifically or not. Second ‘that’ is the default it seems, but I first expected ‘was’ to be emphasized in this sentence
In fluent speech, the conjunction (the first “that”) is unstressed, and as a result some speakers reduce the vowel a bit toward schwa. However, if you told those speakers to carefully pronounce each word, I bet they would pronounce the conjunction and the pronoun the exact same same. A more common example of this kind of reduction is the word “to”, which is almost always reduced to /tə/ ([tə] ~ [tʊ] ~ [ɾə] depending on dialect and surrounding words) in everyday speech when unstressed.
Fun fact, you can reduce just about every unstressed vowel in English to schwa (if it’s not already a schwa) and still be largely understood.
It’s called weak forms, this video goes into a lot of details about them, has examples of “that that” as well: https://youtu.be/qlbGtEg68x4
I always read “read” as “read” but now everything’s different.
Read rhymes with lead the same way read rhymes with lead.
That one’s a readily available lead on how to pronounce both those words.
It is read like lead, not read like lead.
Edit: dammit, someone beat me to it.
Have fun. Or an aneurysm, whichever:
Given the fact that that poem is 100 years old, I would have thought that English would have evolved to fix these issues by now. Oh well.
We need a new language I guess. Maybe it’s time to switch to the most popular language in the world (in terms of number of native speakers): Mandarin Chinese.
As someone who has studied it, have fun with that. While that poem is an outlier, there’s still a ton of things that not even inflection or context can solve.
Maybe better use second most popular: Spanish, it at least uses same letters (differently though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
The use of emojis is.slowly converting written language back to hieroglyphics, so your new language is already happening.
Sometimes we have a do do problem, too. I do do that, anyway.
Yes its called diarrhoea
I don’t get it after the 2nd had, any chance someone else understands?
It needs a comma.
All the good faith I had had, had had no effect.
Essentially “all the food faith I previously had, didn’t have any effect”.
Good God English is an awful language.
I’m pretty sure it is grammatically correct with no comma. The version you provided is a comma splice.
To slightly change the tense, All the good faith that I had had no effect is grammatically correct with no comma, so the gerund form should also not need a comma.
Perhaps. Regardless it’s outlandish abuse of the tongue IMO and definitely would benefit from the comma because nobody’s going to just bang out 4 had’s in a row in speech without a pause without a justifiable slap across the chops and possibly a challenge to a duel.
“But your honour, he said ‘had’ four times on the trot without pause”
“Case dismissed”
no it’s not. you can find quirks like this in every language.
True enough but I feel like English has more quirks than other languages though I acknowledge that may be bias.
I used to have near fluent Irish way back when and I don’t recall any shenanigans like this (again I acknowledge I may not have been presented with them). I feel like most other languages have a more clearly defined set of pronunciation rules too.
Irish looks horrific (Siobhán is shiv-awn for example) but very very closely follows pronunciation rules so that pronunciation would be no surprise to a native reading it for the first time. English sure as fuck does not follow rules like that.
Near. Neat. Book. Boot. Etc.
(Some small subset of Irish folks do say “boo-k” though)
maybe I should have clarified: not every language has quirks in the same ways. German has weird articles that make no sense.
French has different pluralization rules for up to four objects.e: this is probably wrong but there are many languages with different pluralizations for two objects (a dual) and for any number more than two. there are remnants of this in English as well, in words like both, either and neither.But even of you just want to think about writing: German makes super long words that look monstrous by mushing words together. French doesn’t pronounce half the letters in its spelling. Arabic doesn’t really have vowels but instead uses diacritics that are often omitted so you have to be really familiar with the language to read at all.
French has different pluralization rules for up to four objects
What?
well I can’t find a source for it now. maybe I’m misremembering. I read it in the book The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah. maybe it was referring to some remnant exception, maybe it was about another language. can’t verify it cause the book is not nearby right now. maybe I confused it with four different ways to pluralize in French (s, x, aux, none) idk.
Oh, you mean word endings for plurals, well those depend on the gender and the singular word ending. They can be a bit confusing, because they’re not always regular like local -> locaux, but naval -> navals. You have that in other languages too, even in english, like goose -> geese, but moose -> moose, mouse -> mice, house -> houses, and so on.
It doesn’t need a comma, it needs restructuring. When phrasing it like this, it is customary to add a comma between two adjacent verbs. You could even argue that the first part is an introductory phrase, which would explain the comma too.
ah that makes sense, thanks!
You’re welcome. :) Took me a minute tbh. Not sure if the wine I’ve had helped or hindered. It’s 2:30am here.
Why was your food faith no good?
“…did have, did have…”
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
I still feel like the nouns are in the wrong place when I read this.
I’m reading it as “New York cows new York cows bully bully New York cows”
When I want it to read “New York cows bully new York cows” which would be “Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” which isn’t enough buffalo.
I have to inset my own “that” to be able to get my head around “Buffalo buffalo (that) Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”
English has its flaws, but I don’t agree that that is one of them.
