7 Simple Sentences That Drive English Speakers Crazy

2. ‘The horse raced past the barn fell.’

Everything is going hunky-dory until that ‘fell’ at the end, huh? At first glance, you’d be right to think that ‘raced’ is the main verb of this sentence. But it’s not. The simplest form of this sentence is actually, ‘The horse fell’; confusingly, ‘raced past the barn’ is being used as a sort of adjective phrase to tell us which horse we’re talking about— was it the horse tethered behind the barn who fell, or the horse raced past the barn?Of course, this sentence would make way more sense if it was written ‘The horse that was raced past the barn fell’, but the quirks of English allow us to remove certain conjunctions like ‘that’ and still maintain meaning, the way you might say ‘the person I love’ instead of ‘the person that I love.’ Long story short, the horse fell (hopefully on top of whoever invented this sentence).