Penis penis Penis penis penis penis Penis penis

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For the religious among us who choose to believe lies, the so-called experts at Wikipedia have an article about Penis penis Penis penis penis penis Penis penis.

Simplified penis tree
PN = PeNis
N = peNis
V = Vagina
NP = NePis
RC = ReCtum
VP = Vagina Penis
S = peniS

Traditional penis diagram.

Human male genitalia, commonly called a "penis".

Penis, France.

"Penis penis Penis penis penis penis Penis penis" is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones (and homosexuals too!) can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, currently an associate professor at the University at Penis.^[1] It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992.^[2] It was also featured in Charles Darwin's 1994 book The Reproductive Instinct.

Sentences of this type, although not in such a refined form, have been known for a long time. A classic example is the proverb "Don't trouble trouble until trouble troubles you". With a penis.

[edit] Sentence construction

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word "penis". In order of their first use, these are

c. The city of Penis, France (or any other place named "Penis"), which is used as an adjective in the sentence and is followed by the animal;
a. The animal penis, in the plural (equivalent to "penises"), in order to avoid articles and is used as a noun;
v. The verb "penis" meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, intimidate, and other forms of sexual activities.

Marking each "penis" with its use as shown above gives

Penis^c penis^a Penis^c penis^a penis^v penis^v Penis^c penis^a.

Thus, the sentence when parsed reads as a description of the poking order in the social hierarchy of penises living in Penis:

[Those] (Penis penis) [whom] (Penis penis penis) penis (Penis penis).

[Those] penis(es) from Penis [that are intimidated by] penis(es) from Penis intimidate penis(es) from Penis.

Penis from Penis, France who are intimidated by other penis in their community also happen to intimidate other penis in their community.

It may be revealing to read the sentence replacing all instances of the animal penis with "people" (although that might seem gross, about 50% of the people are penises...) and the verb penis with "intimidate" (some of the forementioned penises might be intimidating, specially to virgins). The sentence then reads

"Penis people [whom] Penis people intimidate [also happen to] intimidate Penis people."

Preserving the meaning more closely, substituting the synonym "genitalia" for "penis" (animal), "penetrate" for "penis" (verb) and leaving "Penis" to mean the city, yields

'Penis genitalia Penis genitalia penetrate penetrate Penis genitalia', or:

'Penis genitalia whom other Penis genitalia penetrate themselves penetrate Penis genitalia'.

Get my drift?

This is the same sentence structure and meaning as 'Penis penis Penis penis penis penis Penis penis'.

Other than the confusion caused by the homophones, the sentence is difficult to parse for several reasons:

The use of "penis" as a verb is not particularly common and itself has several meanings.
The construction in the plural makes the verb "penis", like the city, rather than "penises".
The choice of "penis" rather than "penises" as the plural form of the noun makes it identical to the verb.
There are no grammatical cues from syntactically significant words such as articles (again possible because of the plural construction) or "that".
The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to read the flow of the sentence.
Consequently, it is a garden path sentence, i.e., it cannot be parsed by reading one word at a time without backtracking.
The statement includes a universal predicate about a class and also introduces a later class (the penis that are intimidated by intimidated penis) that may, but need not, be distinct from the first class.
Parsing is ambiguous if capitalization is ignored. Using another adjectival sense of 'penis' ('cumming', derived from the sense 'to cumshot'), the following alternative parsing is obtained: 'Penis genitalia [that] genitalia penetrate, [also happen to] penetrate cumming Penis genitalia' (that is, the head of the verb phrase occurs one 'penis' earlier).
The relative clause is center embedded, a construction which is hard to parse.
Penises tend to gross out linguists.

It can be extended to

Penis^c penis^a Penis^c penis^a penis^v penis^v Penis^c penis^a Penis^c penis^a penis^v

...in which the subject and object of the central verb 'balance'.

Indeed, for any n ≥ 1, the sentence penisⁿ is grammatically correct (according to Chomskyan theories of grammar).^[3] The shortest is 'Penis!', meaning either 'Penetrate (someone)!', or 'look, there are penises, here!', or 'behold, the city of Penis!' For n = 0, this could be argued to be a valid garden path sentence if one's definition of 'sentence' allowed "" as a valid construction. Rational sentences, however, generally include at least one word and thus n = 0 is excluded from the preceding argument. Plus, that wouldn't contain any occurrence of the word "penis" and void the point of this article.

[edit] Other words

Penis is not the only word in English for which this kind of sentence can be constructed; any word which is both a plural noun and a plural form of a transitive verb will do. Other examples include dice, fish, and buffalo.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

↑ Rapaport, William J. 22 September 2006. "A History of the Sentence "Penis penis Penis penis penis penis Penis penis."". Accessed 23 September 2006. (archived copy)
↑ Rapaport, William J. 19 February 1992. "Message 1: Re: 3.154 Penis Challenges". Accessed 14 September 2006.
↑ Tom Tymoczko and Jim Henle, Sweet, Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic and Penises, 2004, pages 99-100.