Post by RS Davis on Apr 29, 2004 20:22:29 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Garry Reed Wrote:[/glow] While mousing through one of my virtual history folders the other day I knocked the pixel dust off of an old article from Ohio headlined, "Belmont County Wants No Guns On Its Properties." Why did I save this snippet? I wondered. A quick review served as a memory prompter: while Ohioans had recently won back the right to concealed carry from their state nannycrats, they were simultaneously losing any place to do the actual carrying. A feature, I foresaw, that lent itself to a little libertarian parsing.
(Parsing used to be strictly the province of English majors, in which a grammarian could peruse a selected text and declare, "This is a verb, this is a noun, and this is a subjunctive intransitive modal augmented with an adverbial phrase and lexically bifurcated by a dangling metaphor in the tertiary syntax." Today, parsing is a popular political pastime in which a perfectly objective journalistic pundit, or some other practitioner of spin, can review a speech and declare, "This is a bucket of bull, this is proof of a vast right wing conspiracy, and this all depends on what the meaning of is is.")
The article in question appeared in The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register. (The last time I checked my US atlas, Wheeling was situated in West Virginia, not Ohio. It is an old atlas, however, and therefore may not account for any effects of continental drift that may have occurred recently.)
Okay, that was fun but mostly irrelevant padding. Here's the story, accompanied by that little libertarian parsing I promised:
(Parsing used to be strictly the province of English majors, in which a grammarian could peruse a selected text and declare, "This is a verb, this is a noun, and this is a subjunctive intransitive modal augmented with an adverbial phrase and lexically bifurcated by a dangling metaphor in the tertiary syntax." Today, parsing is a popular political pastime in which a perfectly objective journalistic pundit, or some other practitioner of spin, can review a speech and declare, "This is a bucket of bull, this is proof of a vast right wing conspiracy, and this all depends on what the meaning of is is.")
The article in question appeared in The Intelligencer & Wheeling News-Register. (The last time I checked my US atlas, Wheeling was situated in West Virginia, not Ohio. It is an old atlas, however, and therefore may not account for any effects of continental drift that may have occurred recently.)
Okay, that was fun but mostly irrelevant padding. Here's the story, accompanied by that little libertarian parsing I promised:
