Colourless Green Ideas

26/02/2024 1 min
Colourless Green Ideas

Listen "Colourless Green Ideas"

Episode Synopsis

This is a song based on the sentence 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', which was coined by the linguist Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book, "Syntactic Structures", to demonstrate that a sentence can be grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical. I started writing it in May 2023, then forgot about. I came back to it in January 2024, and finished writing and recording it in February 2024.

Colourless green ideas
sleep furiously
Down in the valley
of the magic money tree

Odourless fragrant fancies
stand horizontally
High on the hill
of the humble bumblebee

Clamorous quiet concepts
shout silently
And swim through the sky
in an outburst of glee

Friendly fiendish flavours
flounce furtively
And fly upside down
through the deep blue sea

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