1. Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
It’s not just required luggage for surviving the weekend at the in-laws’ house--- this sentence contains every single letter of the alphabet, while using the smallest number of letters to do so. Go ahead and check; they’re all there.
2. This exceeding trifling witling, considering ranting criticizing concerning adopting fitting wording being exhibiting transcending learning, was displaying, notwithstanding ridiculing, surpassing boasting swelling reasoning, respecting correcting erring writing, and touching detecting deceiving arguing during debating.
Ending a word with “ing” can make it a noun, verb, or adjective, depending on how you use it. This sentence, found in a 19th century grammar book, explores just how far we can take the versatile “ing” if we put our minds to it. If you take the time to really dissect this sentence, it’s not as crazy as it initially appears: "This very superficial grammatist, supposing empty criticism about the adoption of proper phraseology to be a show of extraordinary erudition, was displaying, in spite of ridicule, a very boastful turgid argument concerning the correction of false syntax, and about the detection of false logic in debate." Well, I guess it’s just slightly less confusing.
3. A woman without her man is nothing.
This has made the rounds on the internet for a while now, but it’s still a
fascinating look at how punctuation can completely change the meaning of a sentence. As the story goes, a professor told his class to correctly punctuate the sentence. The males in the classroom wrote, “A woman, without her man, is nothing.” The women in the class wrote, “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” With just a simple change in punctuation, the entire meaning of the sentence was changed in an instant.
4. “I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”
Author and recreational linguist Dmitri Borgmann came up with this sentence, in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the one before it. The sentence contains twenty words, and although it’s a little confusing to read, if you take the time to analyze it, you’ll notice that it actually makes complete sense.
5. “I see,” said the blind man as he picked up the hammer and saw.
This sentence plays off the fact that ‘saw’ is both a noun and the past tense of the verb ‘to see.’ It could mean that the hammer allowed the blind man to regain his eyesight, or that he uttered the phrase while picking up two tools.
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