> > If you capitalized Peanut Brittle so that "Mom Peanut Brittle" became a name, then it would be semantically correct. It would still be nonsensical, but less so. Ideas can be about orange or oranges. Oftentimes colors are associated with emotions (blue means sad, red means angry), so if you happen to associate orange with some particular state of mind or emotion, then that makes sense. Hatred, I guess, can be granular, if you hate tiny bits and pieces of someone (althogh that's stretching it).
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> Interesting that you'd interpret it that way. When I first read that line, I understood it to be more of a gritty or grinding hatred. The kind that gets under your skin and continues to fester and eat away at you.

That's the neat thing about how full the English language is and how wonderfully wild our imaginations can be on the right sides of our brains. We can put words together that don't make any sense and still get a feeling, image, or impression out of them.

However, just because our human minds can make some sort of personal sense out of it doesn't mean that it is semantically correct. Pump that into a computer that somehow knows English, and it will choke on it. Ideas can not be orange, because orange is an adjective that requires a concrete noun to modify (I intentionally did not use "blue" or "purple," because those adjectives have alternative meanings that can be used to modify abstract nouns -- "blue mood" and "purple prose" -- but "orange" is not one of them). Hatred cannot be granular. "Mom peanut brittle" is not only a semantic error, it's almost a syntactical error, since rules of syntax would include rules about parts of speech and how words of different parts of speech should be placed in a sentence. It's not a syntactical error, though, I suppose, because we can have compound nouns in English, "peanut brittle" being an example. But "Mom peanut brittle" doesn't mean anything at all, so that's a semantic error.

It's interesting that poetry was brought up here. Poetry is not at all concerned with the syntax of English; it's concerned with semantics and beyond, into the even less defined territory of connotation and nuance. My personal feeling is that gratuitous uses of semantically incorrect English in poetry tends to produce garbage more often than not -- but I'd be the last one to say that a good semantically-incorrect poem could not exist.

I would, however, probably be comfortable with the blanket statement that any poem with the line "Mom peanut brittle scavenged the orange ideas of granular hatred" is bad.