Having spent the formative years of my life in Buffalo, I’m always looking to find ways to keep my hometown relevant to the big city types who don’t acknowledge anything upstate of Westchester. What better way then to point out it’s grammatical flexibility?

According to Wikipedia:

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo,” is a grammatically correct sentence used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated constructs. It has been known to exist since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo.

The sentence is unpunctuated and uses three different readings of the word “buffalo”.
In order of their first use, these are:

• The city of Buffalo, New York
• The animal “buffalo”
• The verb “buffalo,” meaning to bully, confuse, deceive, or intimidate

The phrase can be roughly translated to mean “Bison from upstate New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community.”

I thought this was pretty awesome despite the relative lack of bison feuding in the region for the past few centuries. Regardless, feel free to casually slip this phrase into conversation and wait for someone to correct your grammar. That should buffalo them.