You Led Me Up The Garden Path

The idiomatic expression ‘lead someone up the garden path’ means to trick someone, or make them believe something is true when it isn’t.

OK, fair enough*, you say. And..?

Here is a sentence: The old man the boat.

Unless you’re already familiar with ‘garden path sentences,’ your reaction is probably something like Huh? What? Makes no sense.. The thing is when you got to the end of that sentence your brain had been tricked into following a false syntactic path, tricked into believing something that turned out to be incorrect. In other words, you and your brain were led up the garden path.

Before we continue, here’s a musical interlude starring the absolutely fantastic Scottish band The Bluebells, singing their timeless hit song Cath about how she led them up the garden path.

And there you heard them singing «it takes a lot to make me laugh, you led me up the garden path» in their wonderful Glaswegian tones.

So what the hell’s going on with this ‘garden path’ sentence? you say. Well, by the time your brain had read the first three words, it had come to the logical conclusion that ‘man’ was a noun preceded by an adjective. In fact, ‘man’ here is a verb meaning supply with people, a crew… Think Yuri Gagarin and the first manned space flight. So the sentence breaks down into The old (definite article + adjective – a way to refer to the whole group/old people) man (verb) the boat (object). The confusion occurs because we are much more likely to think of ‘man’ as a noun than as a verb.

Two years after Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to do so – the first ‘womaned’ space flight, we could say. Here’s a shout-out to her from conceptual pop historiographers (and quite simply, great band) Public Service Broadcasting.

And here are the lyrics:

Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina

Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina

Valentina
Valentina
Valentina
Valentina

Here’s one more garden path sentence: The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.

If your brain was thinking ‘cotton clothing,’ i.e. clothing made of cotton, then that was when it was led up the garden path. Here it’s because of relative pronouns that we can omit in defining relative clauses. So the cotton (subject) that/which clothing is made of grows in Mississippi. Yay! This is so much fun, right?

Fun indeed, but confusing the brain of your targer reader clearly isn’t something you want to aim for when writing. The person correcting your exam might not be so impressed by your linguistic trickery.

Participle clauses are a good way to inform your target reader and impress your teachers and examiners. But watch out, as they can also cause confusion.

Having been led up the garden path by Cath, I was in no mood for laughter. (fine)

Dressed in her spacesuit, he watched as the cosmonaut floated through space. (confusing – who was dressed in the spacesuit?)

Finally, here’s the trailer to the fascinating documentary film From The Sea To The Land Beyond, featuring old time boats, planes, oil rigs and similar being manned (and womaned).

As always, thanks for reading. This is for my pal Guillermo, the coolest and savviest linguist and music fanatic you could ever know.

*’fair enough’ is a colloquial way of saying ‘that’s reasonable’ or ‘I agree’. Maybe you’re thinking it’s about time I brought this post to an end. Fair enough, I will.