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"I thought that that was the answer."
Note the immediate repetition of a single word, in a perfectly good english sentence. What other examples can we come up with? Can we exceed just a repeating pair, and perhaps get a triple play? or even quadruple -- or better?
No fair to:
-- use battology; or
-- make a word into a proper name (e.g., "Major Major" from Catch-22); or
-- refer to a word as a word (I saw that "that" that that signpainter had misspelled.).
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"I thought that that was the answer."
Back to my school days, I learned that when a word is used like this in a sentence, the two occurrences should be separated by a comma as in:
"Did you know that, that was the way we were going?"
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When there are lots of berries, eat what you can, can what you can't.
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I can't really add to the double or triple plays, but re: the grammar - personally, if I'm proofreading something I would get rid of the comma between the thats. Read it aloud - it makes no sense to pause there. Maybe it's a hangover from German where it's a grammatical necessity to have the comma after 'dass' [how does one do an s-tset??]. It's often fine just to have one 'that', too, but the second that places emphasis [ I think, anyhow]
Alexis
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Here's an example I posted a couple of years ago -- does it fit within your guidelines?
If only she, who had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had the teacher's approval.
Eleven at a blow!
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"Eleven at a blow" Thats a fly remark. Fly, fly!!
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I thought that that "that" that that girl wrote--not the girl behind her--was superfluous.
That's only five, but fun trying.
Edit: I just read the rules and realized I broke one! ha! Sorry!
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PS: The "rules" are an attempt to fit within the logic of a newspaper column in which I read the puzzle. But it's fun to do it both ways: both with punctuation, and "pure".
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the can can dancers
Some gentlemen perfer to watch the can can from a seat near the stage, where (being below the elevated stage) they view the dancers at a distinctly upward angle. One refers to them as infracancaninophiles.
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Gertrude Stein about a city whose name I forget:"There's no there there."
Dear Slithy: Right you are:What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there."
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Easy for you, dr. bill, but not to my poor mind. But I think the answer is "none of the ab-b-b-bove".
Blow, blow, thou winter wind / Thou art not so unkind / As man's ingratitude; ...
Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky, / That does not bite so nigh / As benefits forgot
But methinks I seest a cross thread ...
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Cool list, wwh! Don't see why we could paste it here if we put it in quotes with the url... Think it would be ok?
And, AR, there are several rhetorical examples on that list that at least show the ways in which some of the words from our own examples have been repeated if we felt like parsing here...but none that I noticed in first scannning mentioning the useless repetition overall .
B-b-b-best regards,
Wordwind
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An elementary battology  The sun did not shine. / It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house / All that cold, cold, wet day.
I sat there with Sally. / We sat there, we two.
And I said, "How I wish / We had something to do!"
Too wet to go out / And too cold to play ball.
So we sat in the house. / We did nothing at all.
So all we could do was to / Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit!
And we did not like it. / Not one little bit.
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and if we allow slightly longer chunks: Punctuate the following: (four sentences) "That that is is that that is not is not that that is is not that that is not that that is not is not that that is is not that so?" (spoil your fun if you want to:) "That that is, is. That that is not, is not. That that is, is not that that is not. That that is not, is not that that is. Is not that so?"PS. That is from the same book of shut-in puzzles and other activities ("The Big Good Time Book" was its title) in which I came across (in 1947!) "Tom, where Tim had had "had," had had "had had;" "had had" had had a better effect on the teacher." See PaulB's post eleven (flat-view) entries above, and also http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=wordplay&Number=57545 from 2/22/02. But Paulb's was fist.
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