Nonsensical Sentences

The pioneering French syntactician Lucien Tesnière came up with the French sentence "Le silence vertébral indispose la voile licite" ("The vertebral silence indisposes the licit sail"). The game of cadavre exquis (1925) is a method for generating nonsense sentences. It was named after the first sentence generated, Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau (the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine).

In the popular game of "Mad Libs", a chosen player asks each other player to provide parts of speech without providing any contextual information (e.g., "Give me a proper noun", or "Give me an adjective"), and these words are inserted into pre-composed sentences with a correct grammatical structure, but in which certain words have been omitted. The humor of the game is in the generation of sentences which are grammatical but which are meaningless or have absurd or ambiguous meanings. The game also tends to generate humorous double entendres.

There are doubtlessly earlier examples of such sentences, possibly from the philosophy of language literature, but not necessarily uncontroversial ones, given that the focus has been mostly on borderline cases. For example, followers of logical positivism held that "metaphysical" (i.e. not empirically verifiable) statements are simply meaningless; e.g. Rudolph Carnap wrote an article where he quite literally claimed that almost every sentence from Heidegger was grammatically correct, yet meaningless. Of course, some philosophers who were not logical positivists disagreed with this; at the same time, many who had tried to read Heidegger agreed completely.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell used the sentence "Quadruplicity drinks procrastination" to make a similar point; W.V. Quine took issue with him on the grounds that for a sentence to be false is nothing more than for it not to be true; and since quadruplicity doesn't drink anything, the sentence is simply false, not meaningless. Examples like Tesnière's and Chomsky's are the least controversially nonsensical, and Chomsky's example remains by far the most famous. John Hollander wrote a poem titled "Coiled Alizarine" in his book, The Night Mirror. It ends with Chomsky's sentence. Clive James wrote a poem titled "A Line and a Theme from Noam Chomsky" in his book, Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985. It opens with Chomsky's second meaningless sentence and discusses the Vietnam War.

Stephen Fry delivers the following line in an A Bit of Fry and Laurie sketch entitled Language Conversation: "I can say this sentence and be confident it has never been uttered before in the history of human communication: "Hold the newsreader's nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.""[4] George Carlin used a similar comedy routine called "Things You Never Hear", on his album Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics. A Sprint PCS commercial had a man who spoke the sentences "Well, dimple monkey, twice the pudding, octopi for tango man" and "Very blender shoe, cellular, scooter my daisyheads" to signify that he was confused.

Another approach is to create a syntactically-correct, easily parseable sentence using nonsense words; a famous such example is "The gostak distims the doshes". Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky is also famous for using this technique, although in this case for literary purposes. Other "meaningless utterances" are ones that make sense, are grammatical, but have no reference to the real world, such as "The present Queen of France rides a unicorn." There is no such person as the present Queen of France, and there are no such things as unicorns.