Garden Path Sentences

I don't know if you've ever heard of garden path sentences, but they're my new favorite kind of sentence. Much like a garden path, winding through the eurytopic plants and scenery, these sentences take twists and turns before they reach their main point. Let's look at a few examples, shall we?

Groucho Marx was an iconic user of garden path sentences. One of my favorites:

"Outside of a dog, books are a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."

Marx takes the famous saying that dogs are a man's best friend and makes the phrase "Outside of a..." a bit more literal. Because hey, it's true. It is pretty dark inside dogs...

Other ones of my favorites:

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."

The first sentence takes Fly to be a verb and Like to be a comparing word. But in the second sentence, Fly is a noun, followed by the verb Like.

"The old man the boat."

This one took you a bit longer to figure out, didn't it... It's most often that Man is meant as a noun. Not a verb. But if you rearrange th sentence, it becomes more understandable: The boat is manned by the old.

And one final one, that still takes me a few seconds to remember how it works:

"The mouse the cat the dog chased killed ate he cheese."

 That's wayyyy too wrong, isn't it? There's no way that can be a sentence! Ah, but it is.

Take it like a math problem:

The mouse [that the cat (who the dog chased) killed] ate the cheese.

Garden Path Sentences. Aren't they cool?!