Garden path sentences are grammatically correct, but designed to mislead

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Some examples of grammatically valid sentences which are designed to mislead
There's a famous sentence which reads "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana". It turns out that this is just one example of a sentence deliberately designed to lead you up the garden path ...

Posted by Andy Brown on 01 March 2024

In this blog

1 - Fat people eat accumulates
2 - The old man the boat
4 - The prime number few
5 - The horse raced past the barn fell
A bonus

A garden path sentence is one which is deliberately designed to mislead you. Here are my 5 favourite examples (I've put an explanation for each below, but first try see if you can make sense of each example without any additional help):

Example	Sentence
1	Fat people eat accumulates
2	The old man the boat
3	We painted the wall with cracks
4	The prime number few
5	The horse raced past the barn fell

How many did you read correctly? Here's some explanation to help (with a bonus garden path sentence at the bottom of my own).

1 - Fat people eat accumulates

By the time you're three-quarters of the way through this sentence, you're hopelessly committed to thinking about fat people. But that's because you're reading fat as an adjective, not a noun. Here's the correct interpretation, courtesy of Chat GPT:

Is this fat accumulating? I guess it's not a bad attempt ...

2 - The old man the boat

Again, the brain assumes that old is an adjective in this sentence when it should actually be read as a noun (and likewise most people will read man as a noun when it should be a verb). Here's Chat GPT to illustrate what's happening:

An idyllic scene?

3 - We painted the wall with cracks

This would seem to be counterproductive - surely the aim is to get rid of cracks, not paint them on? But if you rephrase the question things get clearer: the people in question painted the wall which had cracks in it.

How does Chat GPT do this? I still think it's magic ...

4 - The prime number few

Sadly, this is probably true. The trick here is not to think of the phrase prime number as a whole, but rather to see prime as a noun and number as a verb:

Presumably the prime people are the ones at the front?

5 - The horse raced past the barn fell

The problem here is that most people will read raced as a verb, and end up at the end of a sentence wondering why there's another verb. The trick is to read raced as a past participle: the horse that was raced past the barn fell. Easy!

Speed goeth before a fall?

A bonus

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like my Times crosswords, and I once won a clue-setting competition with this clue:

Purchase Dutch clogs? Apparently not! (8, 4)

The answer was bachelor flat. To see why, you need to know that Dutch is a slang word for wife, and read the clue as noun-noun-verb, not verb-adjective-noun.

Although I won the contest with this clue it didn't in the end get published, presumably because it could have been construed as slightly misogynistic. I'd agree, although hope readers can see that the clue was meant to be tongue-in-cheek and humorous!

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