The Dangers of Garden Paths

• If I could just say a few words…I’d be a better public speaker. (Homer Simpson)
• On the other hand, you have different fingers. (Steven Wright)
• I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it. (Groucho Marx)

Speaking of weird words — we are now if you didn’t realize it and…how could you? — the above sentences are examples of a paraprosdokian, a word that does not appear in Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, which means, I guess, that it’s not so unabridged after all. The word does appear on Wikipedia (of course), which tells us that a paraprosdokian is “a figure of speech in which the latter part of the sentence, phrase, or larger discourse is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part.” Another term for said figure of speech is “garden path sentence,” a “grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most likely interpretation is incorrect.” Scientists are intrigued by such things because, well, they can be. They write of “disfluent sentences” and perform studies that find “that intensive eye movements are observed when people are recovering from a mild garden path sentence.” They pursue similar occurrences and phenomena such as the antanclasis (pun), dangling else, dangling modifier, donkey sentence, false scent, and syntactic ambiguity.

But let’s stop here and back up before the cranialfogology gets too thick. Let’s go back to — or up or down — that garden path. You likely are familiar with the phrase “to be led down the garden path,” which denotes an act of deception. But why “garden path”? Why not “led down the yellow brick road” or some such? Our sources tell us (hey, if Sean Hannity can do this, why not me?) that the phrase likely originated in pre-twentieth century England, “where most villages had a garden or vegetable plot, complete with trails or pathways.” Then this:

One possible origin is the old practice of villages marrying off their most unattractive women by tricking a groom into marrying a veiled bride, only seeing his new wife after the marriage has been completed. Weddings were often held in gardens, so the groom would literally be led up the garden path.

The first known published occurrence of the phrase (or a near facsimile of it) was in a 1926 novel by Ethel Mann. Here’s the text: “They’re cheats, that’s wot women are! Lead you up the garden and then go snivellin’ around ‘cos wot’s natcheral ‘as ‘appened to ’em.” The obvious and very #MeToo derogatory interpretation here, like the one above, is that the phrase describes a woman seducing a man.

On any given day, we get offered guidance down or up myriad garden paths. As with everything, there’s a lesson here, one biblical in nature if you lean way. When someone tempts you to step onto an alluring horticultural track of any sort, just remember what happened to Dorothy when she fell victim to all those munchkins musically exhorting her to “follow, follow, follow.” You might even hum the tune in your head as a mnemonic as you stop, look, and find a different and better way to go. Works for me.