Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

     I would like to start this post off by saying I have not been feeling well, and the story I had planned for today needs to be edited still. Instead, I present this post; it is a piece that insisted be written the night before I started feeling sick. I'm sure that fact is unrelated. Tuesday will bring the story.

     Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

     That sentence was written by Noam Chomsky to illustrate how a sentence can have the right type of words in a grammatically correct order and still be meaningless. I first saw it probably a decade ago, and it almost made my brain hurt. I saw it again last night, and the meaning suddenly became apparent to me. 

     To explain the meaning of the sentence, let's quickly look at the meanings of each of the words.

     'Colorless' means 'without color,' but also means 'unexciting or uninteresting'. Poetically, it could also be taken to mean 'unfinished', as in when a painting or comic has been sketched out but not colored in.

     'Green,' in addition to a specific color, is a common word used to mean 'new or untested'. 'Ideas' means 'concepts or thoughts,' or really any mental construction.

     'Sleep' is a verb performable by 'ideas'. 'To be dormant' is one definition of sleep. In this case, dormant means mentally unexpressed.

     'Furiously' means 'full of passion' or 'intensely, energetically'. Since it describes sleep in the sentence, it may appear to present the most difficulty. However, if you've ever seen anyone toss and turn in their sleep, you understand what it means to sleep furiously. It's like sleeping through a nightmare that is trying to wake you. 

     So, my first interpretation of the sentence would be:

     'Unfinished new concepts lay fitfully on the cusp of consciousness.' It refers to ideas right on the tip of your tongue, or things you can almost remember, and inspiration before it strikes, just as you feel it coming. It's ideas that may have been stewing and which are now boiling, with bits of them popping like bubbles on the surface of the soup. ('On the cusp' means 'on the edge.' In this case, it means 'just below the surface of consciousness.')

    Alternatively, you could use 'sleep furiously' as a phrase to mean 'to sleep deeply or with determination, i.e., being difficult to awaken.' Then you can also get, 'Uninteresting new thoughts remain unexamined.' In other words, ideas that seem to bear no merit or interesting features are forgotten, or remain unexpressed by the conscious mind.

     (Both of these statements are true, at least poetically. You could cut them in half and switch things so that the uninteresting ideas boil and the unfinished ones are unexamined  They would still be valid statements, just less apparently true.)

     Taking these meanings together ('Unfinished new thoughts lay fitfully on the cusp of consciousness' and 'Uninteresting new concepts remain unexamined',) it references the tendency for ideas to remain unmanifested by the conscious mind until they are interesting and/or well formed enough to be comprehended. This determination is made by the mind in which they lay. Such ideas may attempt to peek through without quite forming.

     Examples of colorless green ideas sleeping furiously include any detective from any detective series having a theory that they cannot complete (and may not realize they have) until the final clue causes everything to snap into place. Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote) was probably the most obvious about this; her colorless green ideas would sleep solidly until the last clue kicked her mind into high gear and pulled the thoughts together. Other detective shows would show the ideas sleeping more fitfully, as the detectives attempt to fit the clues together more intentionally.

     It might also be an effective way of describing the memories of people with amnesia: the memories are attempting to surface; the person may be able to see the memories just beyond their reach, under the thin veil that separates the conscious from the subconscious.


Other sentences that may express the same idea:

     Unfinished new concepts desperately attempt to be expressed.

     Uninteresting new ideas lay dormant, however desperately they try to be expressed.

     Incomplete new ideas seem to lay dormant in the brain, but are actually writhing with activity in our subconscious.


Note: I'm not the first to assign meaning to the sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." I did write this entry before reading other takes on it, though.

This page seems to be the oldest page that assigns a meaning, though it attempts to assign a singular meaning: David Policar, 1997

Or to take a more creative approach in assigning meanings that I certainly didn't see. Some of the approaches may stretch the expected limits of language: Conscious Entities, Colourless Green Gavagai