So you're going to have a hard time finding sense in deliberate nonsense. It wasn't meant to make sense, but rather to be so outrageous that it stood out from all the other music at the time and became a hit.
Well, let's start out by recognizing this is a silly song. Again the pragmatic expectation is reversed, for the sake of the joke. There's another joke later on: the "horn" is a musical horn, not an animal's horn. This avoids the ambiguity (but also kills the joke). It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying monster that eats purple-people" Using a category word, eg "monster" can also help Punctuation can help "purple-people eater", or changing the word order "eater of purple people". If the pragmatic understanding is likely to be the wrong interpretation there are ways of removing the ambiguity. However, normally ambiguity is a bad thing (as it means you can be misunderstood). What we expect, pragmatically, is reversed. He said "eatin' purple people and it sure is fine Having set up that expectation, the song writer turns it round: We have no pragmatic expectation of the colour of monsters, so this is reasonable. However since we know that people are not purple, the pragmatic interpretation is that the monster is purple, and it eats all kinds of people. But there is ambiguity in whether it is a monster that eats people and is purple, or a monster that eats purple people. We are told that it does have one eye and one horn, and it does fly. The "one-eyed, one-horned, flyin' purple people eater" is (of course) something that nobody has ever seen. Understanding how the joke works means understanding pragmatics: how context affects meaning.
This song, which is meant to be funny plays on ambiguity.
#Song purple people eater how to
It seems perfectly possible that one would encounter adjectives and nouns in various combinations in fiction and it would be helpful to figure out how to parse that. I even found a question here from the nonfictional realm about a "main plugin file line" in which one answer says "you would not normally encounter such a construct" and another which says "There is a clear grammar rule for this situation" but then "you can decide" about separability, and in a world of fiction, a lot is possible. I found an advice column which failed to answer the question. Is there any general rule or guidance for figuring out which adjectives apply to which words in English? (There are one-eyed people, folks who play only a single instrument that would fit in the horns section of a musical group, and there are blue people, so there may be purple ones somewhere as well, but if all those adjectives must apply to the food that really restricts the diet.) The end of the song indicates that the character plays music "through the horn in his head" so "one-horned" appears to apply to the character rather than its prey. If a creature only eats one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people, it'll probably go hungry. If the food is purple, is it also the food that's flying, one-horned, and/or one-eyed? Most visual depictions I see show a purple character (which could, of course, still restrict itself to a purple diet).įor that matter, to which noun do the other adjectives apply? In the lyrics, the "line" of the character is "eating purple people," which suggests that the color of its food is purple, rather than the character itself, but the lyrics also say that the character won't eat the narrator because the narrator is "tough" rather than non-purple. Several years ago, there was a very popular song about a " One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater."
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