Personal Blogs

To the ancient Greeks the celandine was the harbinger of Spring. Its name derives from the Greek chelidōn, for Swallow, another sign of Spring. Our Swallows will not be here for a while, but the birds arrive earler in Greece.

“The man charged by the police to catch the train.”

Not a newspaper headline, but my first attempt at a garden path sentence, a sentence which leads you astray and needs a second take to understand. A classic example, which mine owes a lot to, is 

“The horse raced past the barn fell.”

These sentences are of interest to wordplay merchants, linguists, psychologists, those who study eye movements of readers, and AI researchers. From the earliest study of AI in any form hard-to-interpret and ambiguous expressions have been and still are are a challenge for machine intelligence.

See here for more leads on GPS, don’t get lost,

If your tap is stuck, be careful. Don't faucet.

Why do they say “Slept like a top”? I mean, tops spin round all the time, that’s not restful.

My cat Tiddles in very assertive. He’s a pushy cat.

One of my Christmas presents was a book about how to annoy people living in castles. It’s a fort provoking read.

What would you call a Russian man who has magnetic eyes? Nikolai.