Headlines of the Week (Or Whatever)

So a friend was asking me about haikus and I was explaining that it isn't just about sallables, but has to have a thematic structure, nature references, etc. This led me to Google, as everything does, and I ended up reading all about constrained writing and then on into morning! I mean, all kinds of places, including:

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is an example of a sentence that is grammatically correct, but semantically nonsensical.

Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese, in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese.

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence. Yes, really.

And you can use constrained writing to send a secret message.

And of course, the xkcd comic in which Munroe describes a spacecraft using only the most common words.

On Language Development

From a writing prompt on our Honors Psychology Discussion Board:

I chose to read about Genie, the ‘wild child’, because I had previously seen the film ‘Mockingbird Don’t Sing’, which was based on her life and case history, from the point of view of her predominant worker, Dr. Susan Curtiss, a trained linguist. As I followed links around the Internet, going everywhere from linguistic case studies to film reviews; I began to wonder how environment affects language acquisition. Everything I read focused on the negative impact of a linguistically lacking environment, but I did not see anything that considered the theoretical positive effects of a linguistically rich environment.