 Ryle famously considered absurdities to be the key to detecting category differences. But although Ryle made the method famous, he apparently derived the idea from Husserl’s method of distinguishing categories of meaning (cf. Ryle 1970, 8; Simons 1995, 120; Thomasson 2002, 124–8, and §1.3 above). But while Husserl used syntactic nonsense as a way of detecting differences in categories of meaning (yielding different grammatical categories), Ryle broadened the idea, taking absurdities more widely conceived to be symptoms of differences in logical or conceptual categories (1938 [1971], 180). Thus, e.g., the statement “She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair” (Ryle 1949, 22) is perfectly well-formed syntactically, but nonetheless Ryle classifies it as a sentence that is absurd, where the absurdity is a symptom of the fact that the sentence conjoins terms of different categories.