In Search of the Perfect Garden Path Sentence
Making sense (and nonsense) out of the world’s most devious sentences.
Published in
5 min readDec 8, 2023
The best garden path sentences rely on one of two tricks to garden-path¹ you: 1) Noun/verb ambiguity. And 2) Unmarked relative clauses.
It’s all terribly devious, but with just these two devices, you can throw an unsuspecting sentence-reader…
