Posted By: Pizi (Pizi) on 'Humor'
Title:     had had had had....
Date:      Wed Oct 12 20:49:22 2011

Copied from Wikipedia:

"James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect 
on the teacher" is an English sentence used to demonstrate lexical ambiguity 
and the necessity of punctuation, which serves as a substitute for the 
intonation, stress and pauses found in human speech. In human 
information processing research, the sentence has been used to show how 
readers depend on punctuation to give sentences meaning, especially in the 
context of scanning across lines of text.

It refers to two students, James and John, and their answers to an English 
test, concerning a man who, in the past, had a cold:

John wrote "The man had a cold" which is incorrect grammatically,

James wrote "The man had had a cold" which is correct grammatically.

Since James' answer was right, it had had a better effect on the teacher, 
thus the sentence.

The sentence can be understood more clearly by adding punctuation and 
quotation marks:

James, while John had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a 
better effect on the teacher. 

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