The taste that refreshes
Contributed by David Mansfield on 16 October 2006 at 10:43One famous example of the instability of language is
Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
Despite the similar sentence structure, "flies" changes from verb to noun, "like" changes from preposition to verb, and the opening word changes from noun ("time") to adjective ("fruit" as a kind of fly).
I bring this up only because there is a poster in the Peer Helper office - across the hall from the Writing Crew - that reads:
Are you making friends or drinking buddies?
The intent is clear - "drinking buddies" as a noun phrase contrasts with friends - but I find it more amusing to think of this sentence as parallelism, where "drinking" is a verb contrasting with "making."