Friday, 20th of July, 2007

This is the most evil thing I have ever seen.
I first saw her going anti-clockwise for some reason, and it was indeed only when I focused on the shadow foot and forced myself to see it turn the other way that I was able to turn my eyes inside out. It hurrrrrrtsss us.

It gave me a similar sensation, if more unpleasant, to the one gained from examining these sentences in detail:
Why do more people watch television than I do?
and
More people have been to Russia than I have.

Are they ungrammatical? Well, yes, but that’s not exactly why they’re so fascinating. It’s very nearly impossible to apprehend them as simply ungrammatical - they feel strongly as if they’re genuine sentences.
A bit like Douglas Hofstadter’s self-referential sentences (some of which are paradoxes, some not), they threaten to eat your brain if you look too closely at them. They are still sending me into fits of giggles every time I look at them too closely, half a day after discovering them (over here at Jed’s website as it happens).
“More people have written about this than I have”, and to prove it (huh? no, wait…), here’s a great post about it, with links to a few nice Language Log posts, which characterise them as “Escher sentences”, a lovely coinage indeed.