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Ever since I heard the Sheb Wooley song on a novelty cassette tape (remember those?) from the 1980s (remember when?), I've been curious about this song.
Here is my question: Is the creature purple or are the people he eats purple? Or, does he only eat flying purple people?
Any help is appreciated.
As I recall, it was pretty clear by the end of the song that he ate purple people. You can debate the rest.
But read the lyrics and judge for yourself.
I'm thinking that the use of a hyphen between the operative words would maintain the word order and make the meaning clear: purple-people eater. Without the hyphen, you could also interpret the song to mean that the people he eats are not only purple but gifted with the ability to fly (or are on an airplane).
Punctuation is essential to communication.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people-eater eats people, is purple, flies, and has the requisite number of horns.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple-people eater eats purple people, flies, et cetera.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying-purple people-eater is the very unusual psychedelic color "flying-purple." Jimi Hendrix had a flying-purple guitar.
What a fabulous punctuation challenge! Thanks!
ds
Django Sexton said:
Punctuation is essential to communication.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying, purple people-eater eats people, is purple, flies, and has the requisite number of horns.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple-people eater eats purple people, flies, et cetera.
A one-eyed, one-horned, flying-purple people-eater is the very unusual psychedelic color “flying-purple.” Jimi Hendrix had a flying-purple guitar.
What a fabulous punctuation challenge! Thanks!
ds
dj,
good work on the punctuation, but
hendrix did have a psychedelically-painted gibson flying v, (but usually played white or black fender stratocasters) and a song called purple haze
hedbanger said:
as a kid, i delighted in the song and its ambiguity. a couple of years after it came out, i made a papier-mâché mask for girl scouts. the mask possessed all of the attributes in the title of the song, so i guess that the victims were normal people.
So the mask was purple, besides being one-eyed and one-horned. But, but, wait! The alien only finds purple people tasty. According to the character telling the story, the alien thinks he's gristly because he's not purple.
Regardless, I hope your mask was a big hit.
Things like this are one of the reasons robots have such trouble with human speech. A robot hears a human say this sentence. Where does it assume the punctuation goes?
An even simpler example: bacon and cheese sandwich. Unless the robot has been programmed to know the menu, it will give you a cheese sandwich and a side order of bacon, or a sandwich with bacon and cheese.
Ahh, but now I shall teach that robot that when asked this way, it means that the cheese sandwich shall have bacon on it. What does it know to do when someone orders a big mac and fries? Seeming explicite enough to us, we soon find on our plate a heaping pile of meat and fries under our bun.
If we are to ever have robot servants, we will either have to program them for every verbal idiosyncrasy, or speak our language in a much more concise manner. Sometimes I wonder which would be easier... teaching robots to speak, or teaching humans to...
One'sDingleberries said:
Ahh, but now I shall teach that robot that when asked this way, it means that the cheese sandwich shall have bacon on it. What does it know to do when someone orders a big mac and fries? Seeming explicite enough to us, we soon find on our plate a heaping pile of meat and fries under our bun.
Reminds me of my school lunches! When we had anything in a bun, I'd put almost anything else on the tray under the bun, too, partially to experiment, & partially to gross out classmates & mock their lack of imagination! I even did this a few times with that chocolate / butterscotch / vanilla mixed pudding we often had, which many of us (but not the school cafeteria, of course) called "cow pie pudding," for obvious reasons!
I'm a vegetarian now, but that's not the reason! However, the news often makes me glad I AM a vegetarian, such as the news about tainted beef in our school lunch programs...
One'sDingleberries said:
An even simpler example: bacon and cheese sandwich. Unless the robot has been programmed to know the menu, it will give you a cheese sandwich and a side order of bacon, or a sandwich with bacon and cheese.
I once bought what was advertised as a “Ham and Cheese Sandwich” from a vending machine in Amsterdam to split with my girlfriend. We were greatly dismayed to receive two triangular halves of a sandwich, one with a thin slice of ham, the other with only cheese Much bickering ensued…
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