Semantic Anomaly and Colorless Green Ideas

• It can only be the thought of verdure to come, which prompts us in the autumn to buy these dormant white lumps of vegetable matter covered by a brown papery skin, and lovingly to plant them and care for them. It is a marvel to me that under this cover they are labouring unseen at such a rate within to give us the sudden awesome beauty of spring flowering bulbs. While winter reigns the earth reposes but these colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

  --C. M. Street

• Thus Adam's Eden-plot in far-off time:
  Colour-rampant flowers, trees a myriad green;
  Helped by God-bless'd wind and temp'rate clime.
  The path to primate knowledge unforseen,
  He sleeps in peace at eve with Eve.
  One apple later, he looks curiously
  At the gardens or dichromates, in whom
  Colourless green ideas sleep furiously
  Then rage for birth each morning, until doom
  Brings rainbows they at last perceive.

  --D. A. H. Byatt