Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana

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

A fairly common variant is, "Time flies like the wind; fruit flies like a banana." The semicolon is sometimes replaced by a full stop, or the second half may be preceded by the word but. Some versions have bananas instead of a banana.

Contents

History

The expression is based on the proverb: "Time flies", a translation of the Latin Tempus fugit. This translation is misleading to the modern English speaker, because the Latin fugit did not mean fly in the sense of aviation, but in the sense of flee (cf. "fugitive"); in modern English to say "fly" when meaning "flee" would be unusual. However, this does not seriously affect the perceived intention of the metaphor in practice.

An early example of a pun with the expression "Time flies" may be found in a 1930 issue of Boys' Life:

Flies Around
Scoutmaster: Time flies.
Smart Tenderfoot: You can't. They go too fast.[1][2]

In that form it had already appeared in discussions on linguistics and later in discussions on the feasibility of computer-based linguistic work, but by the mid 1960s the elaboration "time flies like an arrow" appeared in related contexts as an example of syntactic ambiguity. The saying is sometimes attributed to Groucho Marx, but according to The Yale Book of Quotations there is no reason to believe Groucho actually said this.[3] Instead, it traces the quote to a 1982 post on the Usenet group net.jokes. However, the juxtaposition of the phrases "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana" appears already in the 1960s as an example of the problems in having computers understand natural language. An early appearance in print, in slightly modified form, is from 1965:

"Time flies like an arrow" may seem fairly straightforward to us, but a machine sees a number of other possibilities, for example "Time the speed of flies as quickly as you can" ("time" being interpreted as a verb rather than a noun) and "Certain flies enjoy an arrow" ("time" being interpreted as an adjective, and "like" being interpreted as a verb). The machine could be instructed to rule out these particular offbeat parsings, but how would it handle the sentence, "Fruit flies like bananas"?[4]

A more prominent and elaborate example involving bananas appeared in Scientific American in September 1966, a single-topic issue on information and computing, in an article on "The Uses of Computing in Science" by Anthony G. Oettinger. The material was published in book form shortly afterwards.[5] This prompted the following response by Edison B. Schroeder of IBM, printed in the correspondence column of Scientific American, November 1966, page 12 (first and last verses only).

Time Flies Like an Arrow
An Ode to Oettinger
Now thin fruit flies like thunderstorms,
And thin farm boys like farm girls narrow;
And tax firm men like fat tax forms -
But time flies like an arrow!
.....
Like tossed bananas in the skies,
The thin fruit flies like common yarrow;
Then's the time to time the time flies -
Like the time flies like an arrow.
Edison B. Schroeder 1966

The full text is quoted at A Scientist and the Web

The verse has been variously anthologized as a specimen of didactic humor trading on syntactic ambiguity. Like the poem The Chaos, by Gerard Nolst Trenité, [6] it is popular among practitioners and students in fields such as natural language processing and linguistics.

Use in linguistics

The saying is used as a linguistic example of antanaclasis, the stylistic trope of repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time.

It is also used as an example of punning. The wordplay is based on the distinct meanings of the two occurrences of the word flies (the verb "travel through the air" and the noun for certain insects), and of the word like (the preposition "similarly to" and the verb "enjoy"). For example, the second clause can be read as "fruit travels through the air similar to a banana" or as "certain insects enjoy a banana".

This is an example of a garden-path sentence, a phrase that the reader or listener normally begins to parse according to one grammatical structure, and is then forced to back up and reparse when the sentence ends in an unexpected way.

Analysis of the basic ambiguities

"Time flies like an arrow," is an English phrase often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity.[7] In this connection the phrase is often seen as part of the elaboration: "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana".

Although contemporary English speakers unambiguously understand the phrase to mean "Time flies in the same way that an arrow does" (i.e. the common metaphor time goes by quickly), it could also mean:

These variations are popular examples of difficulties of natural language processing by computers.

See also

References

  1. ^ Boys' Life (the official youth magazine for the Boy Scouts of America.) Feb 1930, page 48. Published by Boy Scouts of America, Inc. ISSN 0006-8608.
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ Fred R. Shapiro, ed (2006). The Yale Book of Quotations. Yale University Press. p. 498. ISBN 978-0-300-10798-2. 
  4. ^ Gilbert Burck (1965). The computer age and its potential for management. Harper & Row. p. 62. 
  5. ^ Gerard Piel, Dennis Flanagan, et al.(pub & eds); Information; W.H.Freeman, 1966. Lib. of Congress No. 66-29386
  6. ^ [2]
  7. ^ Marc de Mey(1982), The cognitive paradigm: an integrated understanding of scientific development D. Reidel (1992), University of Chicago Press (1992).