Garden Path Sentences

The path sentences you.

Garden path sentences are sentences you’re likely to read wrong, usually due to a pileup of unlikely circumstances. One popular go-to example is…

The old man the boat.

This looks like it’s missing a verb, but in fact, “man” is the verb and “old” is the noun. Old people are the boat’s crew; it doesn’t have any young crew members. You could get similar results with The old crew the boat.

The reason for the misunderstanding is that while man can be a verb, it is much more likely to be a noun, and while “the [adjective]” constructions can work like nouns—The stupid believe they are wise—they’re also more likely not to. Only when you realize that your interpretation is leading you to a verbless sentence does the real meaning become clear.

The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families. This one relies on a few points of confusion. Complex is more likely an adjective but is here a noun; houses more likely a noun but here a verb; married more likely a verb but here an adjective. A brief vision of smart houses engaging in holy matrimony flutters before your eyes before the military barracks fall into place.

The horse raced past the barn fell. This one’s simpler: raced looks like a verb but has an adjective function—clearer rewrite would be The horse that was raced past the barn fell or The horse, which was raced past the barn, fell. It “works” as a garden path because you can get to the real verb—all the way through past the barn—before realizing something’s wrong. Similar is The florist sent the flowers was pleased.

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. This one’s a bit of a wink to the audience. You probably read the first part as intended but visualized flying fruit before your mind went to the insects.

A long, rambling sentence can often be a garden path, or at least have a similar effect…you may get lost in the reeds the first time you try to follow it, as in the Tom Wolfe sentence below. I think it’s overwhelming on purpose: All round them, ten, scores, it seems like hundreds, of faces and bodies are perspiring, trooping and bellying up the stairs with arterio-sclerotic grimaces past a showcase full of such novel items as Joy Buzzers, Squirting Nickels, Finger Rats, Scary Tarantulas and spoons with realistic dead flies on them, past Fred’s barbershop, which is just off the landing and has glossy photographs of young men with the kind of baroque haircuts one can get in there, and up onto 50^th Street into a madhouse of traffic and shops with weird lingerie and gray hair-dyeing displays in the windows, signs for free teacup readings and a pool-playing match between the Playboy Bunnies and Downey’s Showgirls, and then everybody pounds on toward the Time-Life Building, the Brill Building, or NBC.

Another that qualifies, mentioned here recently, is Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo and its variants. For some similar diabolical examples, consult the work of Jack Shepherd.

These ambiguous, “wrong way first” sentences are a bit like crash blossoms, the ambiguous, “wrong way first” headlines I described last year. Below is a video about “Banana Throws Orange Apple,” a headline few people can parse correctly without context.

But headlines are easier to write in this ambiguous way than full sentences. Some of the other examples given online are actually just poor grammar.

In this Reddit thread, for example, you’ll find…

While I was surfing Reddit went down.
Dave sleeps with Helen and Laura gets a new job.
Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a very short distance to him.
After the young Londoner had visited his parents prepared to celebrate their anniversary.

These are confusing all right, but they’d be a lot less so if their writers bothered to put commas where they belonged:

While I was surfing, Reddit went down.
Dave sleeps with Helen, and Laura gets a new job.
Since Jay always jogs, a mile seems like a very short distance to him.
After the young Londoner had visited, his parents prepared to celebrate their anniversary.

As ever, it’s important not to let our zeal for the strange lead us to see examples that aren’t there.

In the age of large language models, garden path sentences may take on a special significance. LLMs operate on a similar principle to autocomplete: see a word, supply the likeliest next word. Since garden paths are all about the unlikely, they might serve as a fingerprint of human writing in the years ahead…annoying as they can be when they lead you into confusion.

And if nothing else, they let us sample that most human and humbling of experiences—the act of thinking we know where things are going and then admitting that no, in fact, we don’t.