And “and”

I’ve been reading Michael Wagner‘s 2005 dissertation Prosody and Recursion and his examples pulled from Gleitman (1965) remind me of this thing that’s not all that interesting but cute. Check it after the

flip:

So imagine the following scenario. There is someone painting a new storefront sign to a diner. The sign reads Ham and Eggs. Now the owner of the diner comes out front to see how the sign is going, and he notices that the words are squished up together such that it is hard to read. He then tells the painter, “There needs to be more space between ‘Ham’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘Eggs’.”