The Sentence That Ate Paris
It all began with an academic in search of the perfect example. Dr. Hubert Lemaitre, a theoretical grammarian at the Sorbonne, had spent decades refining his craft, determined to construct a single, flawless sentence—one so complete, so self-sufficient, that it could stand as the ultimate model of linguistic structure.
Late one night, fuelled by too much espresso and the existential weight of descriptive inadequacy, he finally wrote it:
“The cat, which, having sat upon the mat that had been woven by the old woman who, despite warnings, continued to study the forbidden conjunctions of an ancient tongue now lost to time, refused to acknowledge the dog, whose very presence implied a contradiction so profound that reality itself trembled, purred.”
Lemaitre leaned back, sweating. He had done it. It was flawless. A perfect system of relations, dependencies, embeddings—self-contained, recursive, and, he realised too late, alive.
As he admired his work, the sentence began to writhe on the page. The relative clauses curled and slithered, the prepositional phrases stretched like probing tendrils, and before Lemaitre could react, the main clause snapped shut like a monstrous jaw, swallowing his notes, his desk, and then, with a horrific belch of phonemes, him.
The Collapse of Paris
At first, the incident went unnoticed, dismissed as yet another academic disappearing into a footnote. But then, strange things began to happen. The Bibliothèque nationale reported that entire sections of syntax textbooks were vanishing. Students attempting to parse complex clauses found themselves trapped in feedback loops, unable to finish their sentences. A linguistics professor disappeared mid-lecture, last seen attempting to explain Rank-Shifted Clauses before he was suddenly absorbed into an unwieldy parenthetical aside.
Then, the sentence escaped.
It began absorbing street signs, menus, and metro maps. Tourists found themselves unable to navigate, as all written language was subsumed into the writhing mass of dependent clauses. The Eiffel Tower, described in too much detail in too many travel brochures, was devoured in an instant.
The Académie Française attempted to intervene. Gathering in a candlelit chamber, they sought to counteract the beast through a powerful act of prescriptive grammar. “It must be destroyed at the root!” cried the chairman. “We shall apply the ultimate weapon—simplicity!”
With trembling hands, they wrote: “The cat sat.”
There was a moment of silence. The sentence paused, quivering. Had they done it? Had they reduced its structural complexity to nothing?
But then, with a terrible roar, it restructured itself, absorbing even their meagre offering. The cat did not merely sit—it contemplated the epistemological consequences of its own posture relative to a mat woven by an old woman who, despite warnings…
The Académie was no more.
The Last Stand
With the city in chaos, only one group remained: a band of rogue systemic functionalists. Led by the last surviving Hallidayan, an elderly scholar known only as The Theme-Rheme Whisperer, they took refuge in an abandoned seminar room.
“The problem,” he said, stroking his beard, “is that we are dealing with a sentence of infinite transitivity. It expands indefinitely, subordinating everything in its path.”
“What can we do?” asked a terrified postgraduate.
“We must introduce ambiguity,” whispered the old scholar. “An irreducible contradiction in the syntax. Something so unstable that the sentence cannot parse itself.”
With shaking hands, they crafted their final gambit:
“This sentence is false.”
The sentence paused. It shuddered. It attempted to embed the new clause within itself, but found it contained a paradox. It tried to restructure, but the contradiction looped back on itself.
The sentence convulsed. The air filled with the sound of collapsing subclauses. And then, with a final, tortured ellipsis, it ceased to be.
Epilogue
Paris was in ruins. Words lay scattered in the streets like fallen leaves. Survivors spoke in fragments, their syntax shattered. The few remaining linguists worked tirelessly to rebuild, utterance by utterance, clause by clause.
But in the dim light of the reconstructed Bibliothèque, a single, forgotten page fluttered. It contained the remnants of a phrase—half a relative clause, waiting, lurking, ready to be completed.
For grammar, like history, is doomed to repeat itself.