Free The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth Page A

useful for polishing, which is why we still buff things until they shine. When something has been properly buffed it looks good, and from that we get the idea that people who spend too much time at the gym running around like crazed gerbils are buff .
    An odd thing about buff leather is that it’s rather pale and, in fact, looks very like human skin. That’s why naked people are referred to as being in the buff , because it looks as though they are dressed in buff leather.
    Some people really did dress in buff leather, as it’s a good strong material. For example, in the nineteenth century the uniform of the New York firefighters was made from buff and the firefighters themselves were often called buffs .
    The firefighters of New York were heroes. Everybody loves a good conflagration, and whenever a New York building started burning the buffs would be called and crowds of New Yorkers would turn out to cheer them on. People would travel across the city just to see a good fire, and schoolboys would become aficionados of the buffs’ techniques for putting them out. These devoted New York schoolboys became known as buffs . Thus the New York Sun said, in 1903, that:
The buffs are men and boys whose love of fire, firefighting and firemen is a predominant characteristic.
    And that’s why to this day you have film buffs and music buffs and other such expert buff alos.
    On the far side of New York state, beside the Niagara River, is a whole city called Buffalo, which is a bit odd as there aren’t any bison there, and never have been. However, the Niagara River is very pretty, and the best guess about the origins of the city’s name is that Buffalo is a corruption of the French beau fleuve , or beautiful river . But imagine if there were bison in the city of Buffalo. Pigeons in London are called London pigeons. Girls in California are called California girls. So any bison that you found in Buffalo would have to be called Buffalo buffalos.
    Buffalos are big beasts and it’s probably best not to get into an argument with one. That’s why there’s an American slang verb to buffalo meaning to bully . This means that if you bullied bison from that large city on the Niagara River, you would be buffaloing Buffalo buffalos .
    But you can go further, and a linguist at the University of Buffalo did. He worked out that if bison from his native city, who were bullied by other bison from his native city, went and took their frustration out on still other bison from his native city, then:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
    Confused? The grammar is easier if you compare it to this version:
Buffalo bison [whom] Buffalo bison bully [then] bully Buffalo bison.
    It’s the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language that uses only one word. Word buffs love it.

Antanaclasis
    Rhetorically, the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses. People have been playing around with antanaclasis since language began. The Romans thought up the Latin sentence:
Malo malo malo malo.
    Which means:
I would rather be in an apple tree than be a bad boy in trouble.
    But neither the Romans nor the bison of Buffalo can come close to what you can achieve in Chinese if you really set your mind to it. Chinese is an incredibly inflected language and you can change the meaning of a word by slightly changing the way you say it. When you add that advantage onto the principle behind Buffalo buffalos and malo malo , you can create something much longer. That’s how a Chinese-American linguist came up with a poem that, in Westernised script, reads like this:
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shī shì, shī shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí