Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously is perhaps the most famous sentence in all of Linguistics, given by Noam Chomsky to demonstrate the difference between syntax and semantics—a perfectly grammatical sentence with no understandable meaning, as Wikipedia describes it. I was reminded of it today when I was listening to the song _Aazaadiyaan_ from the movie Udaan.
Back in 1985, a competition was held at Stanford where participants were asked to provide a paragraph or verse that could give enough context to make this sentence meaningful. One of the entries, also mentioned on the Wiki page, was:
It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Calling seeds green ideas was a rather nice touch, so you could imagine my joy when I saw similar text in the lyrics of Aazaadiyaan:
Pairon ki bediyan khwabon ko baandhe nahi re, kabhi nahi re
Mitti ki parton ko nanne se ankur bhi cheeray, dheere dheere
Iraade hare hare, jinke seeno mein ghar kare
Woh dil ki sune kare na darre, na darre
A rather un-poetic and sad translation would be (my apologies to whoever wrote the original)
Manacles that bind your feet can’t put shackles on your dreams,
Tiny sprouts slowly break through layers of soil
Green (green) ideas, (those) in whose hearts they reside
they listen to and follow their hearts, they aren’t afraid
I don’t know whether it was inspired by colourless green ideas, but it’s rare (and very pleasantly surprising) to see song-writing meet linguistics, if only unintentionally.