Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana

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2021-07-09 19:30:11

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis.

The point of the example is that the correct parsing of the second sentence, "fruit flies like a banana", is not the one that the reader starts to build, by assuming that "fruit" is a noun (the subject), "flies" is the main verb, and "like" as a preposition. The reader only discovers that the parsing is incorrect when it gets to the "banana". At that point, in order to make sense of the sentence, the reader is forced to re-parse it, with "flies" as the subject, "fruit" as a qualifier of "flies", and "like" as the main verb. Additionally, the insects known as "fruit flies" do indeed enjoy bananas, adding yet another valid reading of the sentence. The only minor flaw could be "a banana", which combined with "fruit flies" without article, makes it sound like every fruit flies of the world have a taste for a specific specimen of banana in the middle of tons of this fruit existing on Earth. The correct wording should rather be "fruit flies like bananas (in general)". It is to be noted that in vernacular English it is not uncommon to use the indefinite singular to make a point where the singular object actually represents a set or type of that object. An example of this usage is "My friend Dave is so fat because he loves a doughnut." In this sentence, "...loves a doughnut..." can actually be taken to mean "...loves eating doughnuts...". The phrase "...a doughnut..." is representative of doughnuts generally.

Returning to the gramatically correct pair of joined sentences "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana", the role of the first sentence is to predispose the reader towards the incorrect parsing of the second one. However, after re-parsing the second sentence, the reader presumably becomes aware that the first sentence too could be re-parsed in the same way.

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