'Buffalo' doesn't mean 'bully' in English. It means 'con.'
The Wikipedia article above says that though uncommon in usage, the buffalo verbs in that sentence mean "to bully, harass, or intimidate" or "to baffle".
AIUI, it's only "to bully" in the sense of verbally overwhelming someone into believing what you what them to believe. It's like the word "to snow" (in the sense that means "to con").
I would read "buffaloing" somebody as a less vulgar version of bullshitting, which is also a way of lying about something, mostly to get them to buy something they don't actually need.
Re:Stanford Natural Language Parser
by YeGoblynQueenne on Sunday January 22, 2017 @04:43PM
(#13457709)
I don't think "buffalo" (the verb) having a specific meaning makes any difference in how hard that sentence is to parse.
So I never thought there's something inherently difficulty in the syntax of the sentence- I thought it's just that unexpected third use of "buffalo" that makes it so strange.
Of course, now that I think of it, what you say makes sense also. For an NL parser, the variant use of "buffalo" shouldn't be an issue. You could even say that lacking the context of what a "buffalo" really is, a parser should even find it easier to parse the sentence than a human, who must pause to try and understand what it means.
Maybe it's not such a bad sentence to test parsers after all.