One of my favorite “nongrammatical” sentences from my Linguistics textbooks was:

*My theory rolled down the hill.

(The asterisk denotes it’s nongrammatical.)

Nope, that’s not just nonsensical, it’s nongrammatical. Why? A little thing I like to call “animacy mismatch.” Theories can take verbs (oh, look, it just did):

My theory is awesomer than yours.
My theory explains everything that has ever happened.
Your theory disappoints me.

So why can’t theories roll down hills? Because rolling requires a certain amount of “animacy”—being alive/moving/changing as opposed to being . . . well, inanimate.

Animacy mismatches extend to other grammatical areas. You can have an animacy mismatch with an object (“He thinks the book” as an attempt at a complete sentence.), or a wh-question word (“What thinks the book is stupid?”—”What” questions are answered with objects; “who” questions are answered with people. Does an object or a person think the book is stupid?).

Sometimes, however, animacy mismatches aren’t as clear as theories rolling down hills. Anything strike you as funny about these examples?

• Jerrica is a glut of information.
• The pie, which was only $7.99 full price, so $6.29 didn’t seem like a great deal, ran the sale.
• The stench of week old garbage brushed her nostrils.
• Her euphoria ebbed.

To me, these examples sound a little off. Can a stench brush (if so, that’s one powerful smell!)? Have you ever seen a pie run anything? They might be okay—animacy can be a slippery thing. Can “a feeling of well being” really “fall back or fall away”? Maybe, if you’re writing in a somewhat literary register (even then, unless you’re already using liquid words to describe emotions [“elation flooded her heart”] it’s still a bit of a stretch—you might want to go with a verb requiring a little less animacy, such as fade).

In our search for the right word, sometimes we have to get a little creative. And of course, the style we’re writing in (genre vs. literary fiction, Shakespearean iambic pentameter vs. prose) can play a big role in what is acceptable. But if ever you’ve been wondering how Jerrica turned into a collective noun, now you know why!

What “animacy mismatches” have you found, in your own work or in others’ (I swear someone is putting mistakes in my writing )? What phrases just never seem right to you?