Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Five consecutive 'and's

This very interesting piece originated in our class today. KND was teaching Normalization and suddenly in a typical KND style asked us whether we could use five consecutive 'and's in any proper English sentence. Of course we tried, but he gave little time to think and told us this solution :

There was one shop which sold both fish and meat and so the shopkeeper put up a sign outside his shop, which read : "FishandMeat". The spaces between the words were almost negligible and this prompted one customer to point it out :

There should be a space between the 'Fish' and 'and', and 'and' and 'Meat'.

So now we have a proper English sentence with five consecutive 'and's. The next challenge was to use four consecutive 'can's. The solution to that is :

I can "can-can", can you?

Here, "can-can" refers to a dance form.

I do not know where does KND gets these from, but they are interesting for sure. I remember having seen 12 'had's in a row being used in a proper English sentence. The sentence was so proper, that it required two more paragraphs to explain it well enough for an average English speaking person.

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