Sadly, most people’s lives are a lot more routine. We do the same things, say the same things, repeat the same things we heard. Originality only occurs at the fringes, not in the quotidian.
It probably happens more often to bilingual people, as they tend to mix different languages with each other, so there’s even more possible combinations
I feel the same with music sometimes. How many actual combinations of beats, rhythms, riffs, and all that can there actually be before someone makes something exactly the same by mistake?
Sometimes even the orchestrated music in movies have very similar theme tunes except for the odd difference.
There are billions of people on this earth and only so many words. You can’t be unique every day. With every second that passes, something stops being one of a kind.
Every teacher on this planet says the craziest sentences every day. I feel like we probably cancel each other out, though, if you don’t count the name of the child we’re talking to.
Peter Mayweather the 3rd, decided that today was the perfect opportunity to soil his pants right before he went on stage to perform his highly anticipated rendition of “The Monkey knows what you did last weekend”. I just said this out loud
Indeed, the dulcet tones of the wiener whistle, fell upon the eager ears of the children at play as a redolent aroma wafted from the Weber signaling the summer feast at hand.
I also think that the only thing that is missing is the fact that the other two are not in the same room and the other two are in the same bedroom and the other one is in the same bathroom.
(Letting autofill take care of my one for the day.)
There are so many ways to say the same thing, and with every word choice you make you are basically exponentially decreasing the chance that this specific combination of words has ever been made in this specific way. Its actually easy to be unique, in a low level way in any case. When it comes to ideas its a lot harder to be original
The number of possible sentences in the English language is effectively infinite. Here’s why:
1. No Limit on Sentence Length – Sentences can be extended indefinitely using conjunctions, subordinate clauses, or recursion. For example, “The cat sat on the mat” can be expanded infinitely: “The cat sat on the mat, and the dog lay beside it, while the bird sang in the tree, which was swaying in the wind, as the sun set in the distance…”
2. Large Vocabulary – The Oxford English Dictionary lists over 170,000 words in current use, not counting technical terms, slang, proper nouns, and newly coined words.
3. Combinatorial Explosion – Even with a simple vocabulary, the number of possible combinations grows exponentially. A five-word sentence using a vocabulary of just 10,000 words allows for 10,000^5 (10 quadrillion) possible sentences.
4. Grammar Flexibility – English grammar allows various sentence structures, making it possible to say the same thing in countless ways.
5. New Words and Phrases – New words and idioms constantly emerge, further expanding the possibilities.
While a precise number is impossible to determine, the number of possible English sentences is so large that it effectively approaches infinity.
With just how many people/cultures/conversations there are, and how long humans have been around, a lot of what we think is novel might have been uttered already.
Sadly, most people’s lives are a lot more routine. We do the same things, say the same things, repeat the same things we heard. Originality only occurs at the fringes, not in the quotidian.
Ehh probably not.. half the time I catch myself saying the same kinds of things over and over again and you’ve got to think there’s billions of people out there doing the exact same thing every day.. I’d wager that a few million per day might say something that’s never been said before but the odds that any percentage of people are saying a completely original thing every single day is extremely unlikely
I probably repeat the same sentence day after day.
“Concrete is in aisle 5” is said at least 6 times a day.
Sometimes I give the exact same explanation to two customers in a row, even though the second was standing right beside the first customer, when I told them that the “fix” garden concrete just hardens faster than the regular one but costs 3€ more.
Do other people not pay attention when I explain their question to someone else?
It’s easier to speak a number that almost certainly has never been spoken in the history of the world.
Like this: 653,081,496,133,221,542,630,009,549,911,108,841,193,222,870.
Speaking this out loud would start with “six hundred fifty-three quattuordecillion, eighty-one tredecillion, four hundred ninety-six doudecillion, one hundred thirty-three undecillion…” and so on.
Odds are extremely good that nobody has ever spoken that number, or even spoken those digits together in that order.
You do this with most sentences that aren’t a quote/common expression or like a two-word answer. If you shuffle a deck of 52 cards you’re essentially guaranteed to not hit a sequence of cards that’s been seen before
Any given language isn’t random, but has way more than 52 possible options to choose from. By the time you’re likely to start repeating some sentences, the language will have evolved so much as to become an entirely new language and the words you would have used will no longer match up with their previous words. Tbh, by the time you’re likely to start repeating some sentences, humanity would probably have died out or something, I dunno
I don’t think that’s very likely. The set of words relevant in any given context is a small subset of the set of all words, and it’s not like you pick your words at random and string them together in a sentence, either.
8 billion people alive, another 100 billion have died since 1850 (let’s call this a solid bisector of modern dialects from older ones). Lets assume this is language agnostic (saying I’m hungry in Spanish and English being counted the same, for example). The average person speaks 16,000 words a day with the average sentence length being 15-20 words (let’s go with 20 to be safe). That’s 800 sentences a day. The average global life span has gone from 30-70 years since 1850, so a rough average of 50 years.
So, 108 billion people, speaking 800 words a day for 50 years a piece is 1,576,800,000,000,000,000 sentences. (1.5768E18)
Considering the odds of a randomly generated sentence of 20 words is picked from 171,000ish words in the English language is on an order of magnitude of 1.32E-11, or .00000000000132, there is an insanely low chance that any single randomly generated sentence is going to be repeated. Multiply that chance by the amount of sentences spoken (1.5768E18 from above), though, and about 208 million sentences have been repeated. Divide the number of sentences you speak in a lifetime (70 years on average today at 800 sentences a day, which is 20.4 million sentences) by the amount of repeated sentences, and you have ROUGHLY a 9.7% change of saying a sentence that is a repeated sentence.
Well. Clearly it makes sense to account for commonly repeated phrases and sentences. Nor does it account for the amount of words someone knows and uses in their lifetime (20-35 thousand).so this number should be much higher, and this math only proves that it is entirely possible to say a sentence that is unique. Even if 99.9999% of your sentences are repeated from history, 2 would still be unique
You really just need a “Hey <Semi-unique first name> wanna meet at <local establishment> on <local street> at <time>?” every now and then and it’ll be a completely unique sentence a lot of the time. And that’s a boring example.
I’m certain it’s the opposite. With 8 billion people alive and countless humans already dead, the chances of any of us having an original, unique thought in our entire lives is probably miniscule.
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Sadly, most people’s lives are a lot more routine. We do the same things, say the same things, repeat the same things we heard. Originality only occurs at the fringes, not in the quotidian.
George Carlin had a great bit on this very subject. NSFW, because, well, George.
https://youtu.be/7NjYvOXIHsk?si=9CV5vHiwuyQPUKwr&t=20
I like to think this is true as I don’t subscribe to any particular nomenclature, nor does anyone mimic my unparalleled conversational propensity.
My possible one for today, “Why did you stick the tumbleweed in the fan?”
Especially when you use questionable sentence structure like OP.
almost certainly not because not every sentence is equally likely
“I’m hungry” has been said many orders of magnitudes more than “I want to french kiss an onion”
Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.
It probably happens more often to bilingual people, as they tend to mix different languages with each other, so there’s even more possible combinations
I feel the same with music sometimes. How many actual combinations of beats, rhythms, riffs, and all that can there actually be before someone makes something exactly the same by mistake?
Sometimes even the orchestrated music in movies have very similar theme tunes except for the odd difference.
There are billions of people on this earth and only so many words. You can’t be unique every day. With every second that passes, something stops being one of a kind.
Polymip is a dangle in the mar.
100% true for me, since I work in tech and the tools we use change constantly, and all the names are weird.
I’m gunna go munt my grandma in Ohio, on diddy.
Unless you are trying. I agree.
Mathematically, every time you randomly shuffle a standard deck of 52 playing cards, odds are that particular combination has never occurred before.
Every teacher on this planet says the craziest sentences every day. I feel like we probably cancel each other out, though, if you don’t count the name of the child we’re talking to.
Peter Mayweather the 3rd, decided that today was the perfect opportunity to soil his pants right before he went on stage to perform his highly anticipated rendition of “The Monkey knows what you did last weekend”. I just said this out loud
Indeed, the dulcet tones of the wiener whistle, fell upon the eager ears of the children at play as a redolent aroma wafted from the Weber signaling the summer feast at hand.
Happens to me all the time.
Especially true when you have young children.
“No, you cannot put the little pirate’s wooden leg in your brother’s nostril.”
I also think that the only thing that is missing is the fact that the other two are not in the same room and the other two are in the same bedroom and the other one is in the same bathroom.
(Letting autofill take care of my one for the day.)
Boy that Italian family over there sure is quiet.
I can’t say with certainty, but I would wager that there are days where I don’t speak at all.
Two giraffes dildo a black hole
I reckon if you put this comment through a filter there will likely not be one that is exactly the same, even though it’s only one sentence.
There are so many ways to say the same thing, and with every word choice you make you are basically exponentially decreasing the chance that this specific combination of words has ever been made in this specific way. Its actually easy to be unique, in a low level way in any case. When it comes to ideas its a lot harder to be original
Cat popsicle king hotdog train atom quark cat popsicle hotdog cat burger bun cat.
That’s my daily unique sentence for today.
There’s a sub dedicated to this, /r/brandnewsentence
“I’m gonna shove this red hot poker up my ass and chop my dick off, then sell the kids to Zanzibar”.
According to chat gpt:
The number of possible sentences in the English language is effectively infinite. Here’s why:
While a precise number is impossible to determine, the number of possible English sentences is so large that it effectively approaches infinity.
With just how many people/cultures/conversations there are, and how long humans have been around, a lot of what we think is novel might have been uttered already.
Naw fam, all the illest phrases probly been said one too many times in the history of the English lexicon.
what in the cow slop
Holy spicy chicken and waffles with a side of bitch-ass truffle curly fries, you’re right.
I used to have my students come up with likely candidates in my class
yes and today’s sentence was “You can use this old bullet vibrator to function as the vibrating metronome for your high school stem project.”
Sadly, most people’s lives are a lot more routine. We do the same things, say the same things, repeat the same things we heard. Originality only occurs at the fringes, not in the quotidian.
Edit: dang, someone already said this
Ehh probably not.. half the time I catch myself saying the same kinds of things over and over again and you’ve got to think there’s billions of people out there doing the exact same thing every day.. I’d wager that a few million per day might say something that’s never been said before but the odds that any percentage of people are saying a completely original thing every single day is extremely unlikely
I like George Carlin’s “Hand me that piano”.
From A Little Fry and Laurie, “Hold the newsreader’s nose squarely, waiter, or friendly milk will countermand my trousers.”
Exploding storks are discombobulating nine times every four days
Sometimes you just have to put a party lawn mower in the blender for safe keeping
You guys are talking to people?
r/BrandNewSentence materials
r/BrandNewSentence
https://libraryofbabel.info/book.cgi
except every sentence possible is already on this website
You mean permutations?
You’ll love r/brandnewsentence then
I probably repeat the same sentence day after day.
“Concrete is in aisle 5” is said at least 6 times a day.
Sometimes I give the exact same explanation to two customers in a row, even though the second was standing right beside the first customer, when I told them that the “fix” garden concrete just hardens faster than the regular one but costs 3€ more.
Do other people not pay attention when I explain their question to someone else?
It’s easier to speak a number that almost certainly has never been spoken in the history of the world.
Like this: 653,081,496,133,221,542,630,009,549,911,108,841,193,222,870.
Speaking this out loud would start with “six hundred fifty-three quattuordecillion, eighty-one tredecillion, four hundred ninety-six doudecillion, one hundred thirty-three undecillion…” and so on.
Odds are extremely good that nobody has ever spoken that number, or even spoken those digits together in that order.
I don’t know about this, The more time I spend with LLM systems the more I think human thought is highly predictable.
You do this with most sentences that aren’t a quote/common expression or like a two-word answer. If you shuffle a deck of 52 cards you’re essentially guaranteed to not hit a sequence of cards that’s been seen before
Any given language isn’t random, but has way more than 52 possible options to choose from. By the time you’re likely to start repeating some sentences, the language will have evolved so much as to become an entirely new language and the words you would have used will no longer match up with their previous words. Tbh, by the time you’re likely to start repeating some sentences, humanity would probably have died out or something, I dunno
Pelican bride skeleton pie.
“I wonder if the uuid D1F54F10-7622-403C-8E6C-0BA5ADC8D26A is really unique.”
There are days I say no sentences at all.
I don’t think that’s very likely. The set of words relevant in any given context is a small subset of the set of all words, and it’s not like you pick your words at random and string them together in a sentence, either.
Well, fuck my fistula.
I say weird shit all the time to my wife so I’m probably like 3-5 a day.
Yes, lots of combinations. However, there are many more permutations!
I don’t even speak every day.
Do colorless green ideas still sleep furiously?
I think of the autocorrect lost that had me utter the phrase “Wawa skittle tits” many times in my life now.
Oh yea?
Well, my lesbian meatloaf ran down the ladder and killed Martians for looking at a horse.
This assumes a uniform distribution of “possible sentences” across the “sentences I say” axis.
8 billion people alive, another 100 billion have died since 1850 (let’s call this a solid bisector of modern dialects from older ones). Lets assume this is language agnostic (saying I’m hungry in Spanish and English being counted the same, for example). The average person speaks 16,000 words a day with the average sentence length being 15-20 words (let’s go with 20 to be safe). That’s 800 sentences a day. The average global life span has gone from 30-70 years since 1850, so a rough average of 50 years.
So, 108 billion people, speaking 800 words a day for 50 years a piece is 1,576,800,000,000,000,000 sentences. (1.5768E18)
Considering the odds of a randomly generated sentence of 20 words is picked from 171,000ish words in the English language is on an order of magnitude of 1.32E-11, or .00000000000132, there is an insanely low chance that any single randomly generated sentence is going to be repeated. Multiply that chance by the amount of sentences spoken (1.5768E18 from above), though, and about 208 million sentences have been repeated. Divide the number of sentences you speak in a lifetime (70 years on average today at 800 sentences a day, which is 20.4 million sentences) by the amount of repeated sentences, and you have ROUGHLY a 9.7% change of saying a sentence that is a repeated sentence.
Well. Clearly it makes sense to account for commonly repeated phrases and sentences. Nor does it account for the amount of words someone knows and uses in their lifetime (20-35 thousand).so this number should be much higher, and this math only proves that it is entirely possible to say a sentence that is unique. Even if 99.9999% of your sentences are repeated from history, 2 would still be unique
Not me, all I say is ‘that’s crazy bro’
You underestimate my stupidity.
And that won’t be a unique statement.
I found myself saying the sentence “I’ve hung my cheese in the shower.” The other day and I’m quite sure that was a new one for me.
double that is the sentence doesn’t need to be grammatically correct or actually make any sense.
Example: My dinosaurs don’t put their armpits in the microwave anymore.
Wait until you find out about 52!.
EVERY deck of cards EVER shuffled, was and will be shuffled in a brand new order.
https://youtu.be/0DSclqnnC2s?si=PFw8CFRfm3tt25Hi
Especially when I use words wrong
I don’t know if I’ve shitflopped a garter on a gollydooch before, but if I have, it was probably with a Grayson basket on a Norman sunday.
You really just need a “Hey <Semi-unique first name> wanna meet at <local establishment> on <local street> at <time>?” every now and then and it’ll be a completely unique sentence a lot of the time. And that’s a boring example.
Look up the library of babel. Every possible sentence has already been written. Look up the library of babel
I’m certain it’s the opposite. With 8 billion people alive and countless humans already dead, the chances of any of us having an original, unique thought in our entire lives is probably miniscule.
Nah not really.
You are underestimating the number of people on this planet, also how mundane and predictable most of us are.
A unique sentence a year, that seems doable.
Probably not, since most of what you say are not randomly generated, but instead a series of repetitive sentences you repeat almost everyday