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Comment by OtterCoder | Hacker News Reader

That is an incredibly difficult title to parse if you are from a certain background. I spent about a minute trying to imagine how someone might have made a human/cow chimera, and what that might have to do with harmonics.

In my defense, I had read the following article about rat/human chimeras earlier today:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/4867891/scientists-give-rats-c...

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A sentence where you begin parsing one way, find it it impossible to complete, and have to backtrack substantially (so that the intended meaning changes drastically) is called a garden path sentence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

My favorite is "The old man the boat" :)

Great read! The see also links have a lot of other peculiar sentences that I've come across frequently but never considered they were constructed deliberately nor that there were actual terms describing the oddities.

Ha, it's like a branch misprediction but for language, very cool

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

Trying to imagine time flies, here. Generally, I hate flies. I imagine that time flies bite something. But what?

banana? ;)

Something out of Lovecraft, I think.

TIL, thanks.

The wiki page was posted on HN earlier this year, here's the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10613213

Because articles from The Sun generally make me grind my teeth, I quickly hunted down the study they reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23995685

What's the alternative parsing? I'm not a native speaker, so I'm probably missing something, but it seemed pretty natural to read to me.

‘steer’ being a term used for castrated cattle

Human sperm use second harmonics of the flagellar beat to steer

What makes it more awkward is that the article "the" is used in one place, but is omitted in another.

I read it as 'human sperm beer' at first glance, and was getting to how it had harmonics from the wiggly tails or something when i realized that mercifully, that is not what it says.

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