Colorless green dreams sleep furiously

The title of my post is one of my favorites. Altho' I am not a huge fan of Chomsky, it is a prime example of a verbal construct that is grammatically correct, but meaningless.

Colorless things cannot have a color. Dreams to not sleep.

Yes, if you wanted to argue this as a symbolic combination of ideas or even a metonymy, you could make that argument. However, it is nonsensical from a linguistic perspective and not an interpretive one.

I am amazed when I think about the ability of the human body. A well constructed machine that breathes and circulates and self-repairs without one nanosecond of input from us consciously.

Equally amazing to me is language.

We push breath across our vocal chords, muscles automatically move to position the tongue and lips and recognizable words come out.

We use our fingers to key in letters on a keyboard. Letters that aren't our mind, but what is *in* them.

How you reassemble these characters on the screen is how you understand what I am trying to communicate.

I tell my students: Look at a sign, for example, with words on it and try *not* to read it.

What is missing from some people's language is the ability to understand the intention of someone else's words. Even if they can read them. Comprehend the definitions of the words. But they are unable to process or think critically about someone else's words.

What is the speaker's purpose? What kinds of evidence to support that purpose can you draw from their text?

Who is the audience?

What kinds of arguments does the writer/speaker use? Deliberative? Definition? Contrast?

Aristotle should be required reading for students. He writes about how a speaker creates her/his authority *in words* and what tools of language and what constructs she/he uses to create that communication.

In other words: the critical utility of language and the construction of meaning for the self.

It's a disappearing art.

Words perch flying stationary.

Happy Sunday all.