THE COOL KID'S GUIDE TO READING: Words can be nettlesome little nags

You know those laminated copies of my columns you keep in a fake can of peas hidden under the floorboard of your pantry?

Get 'em.

Got 'em?

Good.

Find the one about the rat, the cat and the dog. That was one mind-bending sentence, eh?

I got another one. This one I read in the Wikipedia entry on garden path sentences. Here it is:

The horse raced around the barn fell.

Tricky, eh?

Lot of eh so far, eh?

What's so unexpected about the sentence is that "fell" turns out to be the predicate, when you were sure "raced" was. In English, we're not used to a singular predicate verb being the last word in a complex sentence.

Here it is again, reduced to its simple sentence form:

The horse fell.

The words "raced around the barn" are a modifying element within the subject, making up -- along with "horse" -- a noun phrase.

Adding to the confusion is the writer's diabolical choice of "horse" and "raced." Those two are hardwired in our minds as commonly related object and action -- thus, subject and predicate.

Horses race. That's what they do, eh?

And since we're discussing subjects and verbs and such, do you know that every part of the sentence you are reading right now is a noun?

It's true. Every part of every sentence ever written is a noun.

Eh?

No?

To wit, then:

The word "about" that I'm about to write, but did before I could get to it, is a preposition, and preposition is a noun, just like the names of the other parts of the sentence are -- article and conjunction, for example.

So, every part of every sentence is a noun.

Verb, too, is a noun.

But don't tell its mother that.

And since you suffered so stoically through this Zeno's Paradox of a grammar class, I'm giving you an eh.

To contact writer Randy Waters, call 744-4240 or email rwaters@macon.com.

This story was originally published January 3, 2016 at 11:56 AM with the headline "THE COOL KID'S GUIDE TO READING: Words can be nettlesome little nags ."