How to avoid being led down a garden path
This problem is common enough that linguists have their own special nickname for it.
A Costa Rican worker picks up bananas during the packing process on a banana plantation in Siquirres, Costa Rico.
Juan Carlos Ulate/Reuters
鈥淭ime flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.鈥�
This admirably compact joke turns on the way so many English words play different roles in different sentences, like acrobats rearranging themselves in a human pyramid.
In the first sentence, time is a noun. Flies is the verb. The two words are bound together in a proverb so old it was borrowed from Latin (tempus fugit). 鈥淟ike an arrow鈥� provides extra zing. The pattern is noun plus intransitive verb plus prepositional phrase.
At first glance, the second sentence seems to follow the same pattern.
But wait a minute: Fruit doesn鈥檛 鈥渇ly鈥� like a banana. A banana is a fruit. And here, fruit is more like an adjective, modifying flies.
It can do that because flies isn鈥檛 a third-person singular verb, as in the first sentence. It鈥檚 a plural noun, subject of like, which was a preposition in the first sentence but is a plural verb in the second. The pattern of the second sentence is thus attributive noun (adjective) plus plural noun plus transitive verb plus direct object.
Not until you get to that direct object (鈥渁 banana鈥�) does the whole thing make sense. You鈥檝e been led down what linguists call 鈥渁 garden path.鈥澛�
A garden path sentence is 鈥渙ne that is exceptionally hard for the reader to parse,鈥� as the grammar website notes.
Garden paths are of interest not only to comedians but to computer scientists in the field of natural language programming 鈥� Siri, do you understand what I鈥檓 saying? How can a mere bot make sense of 鈥渇lies like a banana鈥�?
But writers need to pay attention to garden paths, too.聽
Ordinarily, the goal should be to lead readers from one logical idea to the next. They should not have to carry on an inner dialogue (鈥渙h, that must have been the main verb鈥�) and keep reevaluating each word read in the light of what comes next, like a GPS device 鈥渞ecalculating, recalculating鈥� when a driver turns unexpectedly.
A classic garden path sentence is 鈥淭he horse raced past the barn fell.鈥� It鈥檚 perfectly grammatical, but it will make a reader stumble.
As Stacked Exchange explains: 鈥淭he ambiguous word is raced and the disambiguating word is fell.鈥� When you get to 鈥渇ell,鈥� in other words, the little light bulb of meaning switches on. You realize 鈥渞aced鈥� wasn鈥檛 the main verb.
Better would have been, 鈥淭he horse that was raced past the barn fell.鈥� Or in a tight space: 鈥淭he horse driven past the barn fell.鈥� (鈥淒riven,鈥� unlike 鈥渞aced,鈥� can鈥檛 be mistaken for the predicate verb.)
You can have fun playing in the 鈥済arden鈥� 鈥� just search online for 鈥�garden path sentences.鈥�
But in the real world of workaday prose, you鈥檒l want to remember that it can be a false economy to leave out commas, definite articles, and even 鈥渢hat鈥� clauses that help make a sentence clear from start to finish.聽