A challenge for the long nights

It sometimes comes as surprise to students of books history to learn that many ancient scripts were written in scripta continua, that is with no gaps between the words. Even more surprising, it was the Irish who sorted out this minefield of potential misunderstanding sometime before the year 1000 ad, due, apparently, to their difficulties in deciphering Latin words with which they were not terribly familiar.

The possibility of misreading individual words and even sentences is apparent, although context presumably ironed out much of the confusion. We've been wracking our brains to come up with a few examples of sentences which could be read in more than one way, and it is not as easy as it seems. One fairly simple example is: menswearupstairs. The best we could do is:

whatbookstolendreadfully

So, this month's challenge to readers is to produce the longest, most ambiguous, sentence they can. There will be a small prize for the best entry received. We don't like to think of our customers slaving away over the festive season, so we've decided to extend the deadline from our usual one month to the end of January (by email, snail mail, or blog-comment). The winning sentence will, of course, be given on the blog in early February.

Good luck, and Happy Christmas to all our customers, past, present and future.