---
title: "Not the sharpest tool in the shed" is a joke meaning not very clever. — Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes… · tree and pragmatics
description: "Not the sharpest tool in the shed" is a joke meaning not very clever. Who acts: sharpest tool, joke. A sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school with its dependency tree and the pragmatics of
---

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# Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness, sentence 10

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"Not the sharpest tool in the shed" is a joke meaning not very clever.

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**Who acts:** sharpest tool, joke · **What happens:** be, mean · **To what, where:** joke

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This is a sentence of the lesson «Soft words for hard things: failure and mistakes and stupidity and madness» of the euphemisms course of Mova's primary school. The page gives its syntax tree — a dependency tree in the style of Universal Dependencies — and its pragmatics clause by clause: who acts (sharpest tool, joke), what happens, when and where, as Mova's frames read it from the tree.

## The tree {#tree}

```conllu
# sent_id = school:euphemisms:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.lesson:10
# text = "Not the sharpest tool in the shed" is a joke meaning not very clever.
# source = school lesson (ours)
# course = euphemisms
# lesson = 035-mistakes-and-stupidity.lesson
# annotation = Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change
1	"	"	PUNCT	``	_	5	punct	_	_
2	Not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	5	advmod	_	_
3	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	5	det	_	_
4	sharpest	sharp	ADJ	JJS	Degree=Sup	5	amod	_	_
5	tool	tool	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	12	nsubj	_	_
6	in	in	ADP	IN	_	8	case	_	_
7	the	the	DET	DT	Definite=Def|PronType=Art	8	det	_	_
8	shed	shed	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	5	nmod	_	_
9	"	"	PUNCT	''	_	5	punct	_	_
10	is	be	AUX	VBZ	Mood=Ind|Number=Sing|Person=3|Tense=Pres|VerbForm=Fin	12	cop	_	_
11	a	a	DET	DT	Definite=Ind|PronType=Art	12	det	_	_
12	joke	joke	NOUN	NN	Number=Sing	0	root	_	_
13	meaning	mean	VERB	VBG	VerbForm=Ger	12	acl	_	_
14	not	not	PART	RB	Polarity=Neg	16	advmod	_	_
15	very	very	ADV	RB	_	16	advmod	_	_
16	clever	clever	ADJ	JJ	Degree=Pos	13	xcomp	_	_
17	.	.	PUNCT	.	_	12	punct	_	_
```

## Pragmatics {#pragmatics}

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No stored speech act for this sentence.

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| # | verb | tense, mood | who | what, whom | to whom | where | when | other | roles by |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1 | **is a** | present | the sharpest tool in the shed | a joke |  |  |  |  | tree rules |
| 2 | **mean** | gerund | a joke *not said here* |  |  |  |  | clever *property* | vn intend-61.2-1 «NP V S»: agent=Agent |

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One row per clause the reader finds. «not said here»: a role filled from the clause above. «roles by»: a VerbNet class and frame when one fits the verb, else the reader's rules on the tree.

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**Licence: [CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)**, as the whole of Mova corpus 0.4, of which this treebank (the agreed school, `mova-school-agreed-en.conllu`) is part. The lessons were written for Mova's primary school. Sentence `school:euphemisms:035-mistakes-and-stupidity.lesson:10`.

**The tree:** Mova annot: Rust (en) → Haiku 5.5 (medium, Batches API) patches; gates UD 2.18; agreed by treeagree rules (Stanza, Trankit, spaCy trf): no change. **The frames** are read from the tree by Mova's frames reader (`prag`) when this page is built, the lesson read in order, so a pronoun may be resolved from an earlier sentence.

See the [release 0.4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/releases/0.4/).

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