Why “The old man the boat” reads as broken: garden-path sentences
30seconds
Read this: The old man the boat. If it stalled you at the end, your brain did exactly what it always does: it guessed ahead and lost the bet.
A garden-path sentence is perfectly grammatical, but its most obvious reading dead-ends. Step through two classics one word at a time, watch the exact word where your first parse breaks, then see the rebuilt structure that makes them work.
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