Down the Garden Path LBC 06/17/2016

Down the Garden Path - this week's topic comes from Lin.

Trust me. I'll get that  money I owe you soon.

You'll love this. The view is spectacular. 

Try it. It will be good for you. 

Connection to a veiled bride?  Can it be that in the very old days villages married off their unattractive brides by hiding them behind a veil thereby deceiving the poor schmuck of a groom? Would people really do that?

I there a chance  a garden is so spectacular that it distracts someone and allows him/her to be easily deceived? 

Psycholinguists have adopted the term 'garden path sentence' for a sentence that fools the reader by being grammatically correct whilst beginning in such a way that their most likely first interpretation of it will be wrong. For example: "He told the boy the dog bit Bob would look."

The first known published occurrence of 'lead you up the garden' is in Ethel Mannin's 'Sounding Brass' (1926) where it refers to women leading me. Heck - that might make gardens even more popular. 

Trust me - I am not making this up. The Northern Cobblestone Blog did. 

There are  couple of interesting examples going on right now. Try following the rhetoric regarding England's upcoming referendum regarding leaving the EU. Or follow the presidential election rhetoric right here in the good old USA.

Real origins? Is it not ironic that God led Adam and Eve  into the Garden of Eden knowing it was a veritable minefield of issues  that his/her admittedly imperfect creations could stumble and fall over since he also gave them free will.  Do anything you choose! But if you don't do just what I say, you  are gonna get a whippin! Yep - God has a sense of humor for sure. So I submit that may have been the first use of the term up/down the garden path.
More examples of  God's sense of humor -

Ever see a duck-billed platypus?

And if God only gives you what you can handle clearly I am a bad-ass in his/her eyes.

So the garden path has been with us a long, long time. Don't be fooled by the salesman - in whatever the circumstance you find yourself on that path. Gardens may not always be what they seem.