Linguistics Krazy Korner: “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den”

“The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den” is a 92-character modern poem written in Classical Chinese by Yuen Ren Chao, in which every syllable has the sound shi (in different tones) when read in modern Mandarin Chinese. [Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

In other words, the following series of sushes is this poem:

In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.

He often went to the market to look for lions.

At ten o’clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.

At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.

He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.

He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.

After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.

When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.

Try to explain this matter.


Man, now I’m mad-crazy craving stone-lion sushi . . .


See also, this grammatical and actually pretty reasonable English sentence: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” tl;dr: American Bison from Buffalo, NY are total jerks, and it’s a vicious cycle.