Instructions for the Chutry Experiment:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.

The nearest book to me at this time is, I'm afraid, the "poisonous little collection of bad grammatical advice" that is (the 4th edition of) The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. Geoff Pullum, I think, will be most unhappy to hear this, for like zeiran r'ei, "the lower case and apostrophe being apparently mandatory", I had not heard of it until I read Geoff's posts at the Language Log. (Geoff will also probably be dismayed to hear that the Strunk and White book is currently in great demand from the library at the University of Essex.) Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which way you look at it), this book only has 105 pages, so I must choose the second nearest book, which I have mentioned elsewhere. It is Historical syntax in cross-linguistic perspective by Alice C. Harris and Lyle Campbell.

Do sentences in brackets count? For the fifth sentence on p.123 is in brackets. It is:

(See also Haugen [1954: 385--6], who reaffirms this claim with respect to bound morphemes.)

Not the most exciting sentence ever; possibly the reason I fail to see the point in this exercise.

Automagically-generated possibly-related posts:

• The meme formerly known as the Chutry Experiment

categories: Memes
tags: books, experiments
last modified: 20th Feb 2012