Linguistics

I heard a fun Chomsky quote today: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously." His point was that the sentence is grammatically correct (syntax) while being nonsensical with respect to meaning (semantics). In reflecting on Chomsky's point, it occurred to me that linguistics can serve as a framing metaphor for how we go through life. Grammar and other linguistic rules provide guidelines for forming words from letters, sentences from words, paragraphs from sentences. Or lines from words, stanzas from lines, poems from stanzas, and so forth. Rules (syntax) are the building blocks for poetry, literature, plays, and so forth. But simply following rules and convention does not necessarily create something worth reading. You can call a poem a haiku by creating three non-rhyming lines of 5-7-5 syllables respectively, but that does not mean that it's any good or necessarily makes sense. In life we show up to meetings on time and focus our attention. Sometimes it isn't valuable for us to attend that meeting. Or the meeting might be pointless. Or the meeting might be supporting an initiative that is silly. (Yes, I recognize that the structure of the last two sentences is grammatically flawed.) In going through life we almost always abide by syntax, but how often do we contemplate semantics? Do you live your life or does life happen to you?