garys@bunker.UUCP (Gary M. Samuelson) (05/03/85)
I deleted net.politics and net.legal from the newsgroup list, and added net.nlang because I want to know if my analysis is correct. > > I think the point of whether it is good or not good to carry personal > > defense weapons (unconcealed) is moot when compared with the fact that if I > > WANT to and am not violating someone else's personal rights, I should be > > able to. I think that says it all. -- Jay Mitchell > > Interesting that this statement can be parsed two ways: > > ...I should be able to [carry personal defense weapons]. > > ...I should be able to [violate someone else's personal rights]. > > The first meaning was meant, of course, but it makes the second easier, too. > > Merlyn Leroy > "Eat photons, terran scum!" I think there's a bug in Merlyn's parser. How can "I should be able to" refer to anything other than "to carry personal defense weapons" (the only infinitive present) ? There is also a syntactic problem -- the second part of the condition ("If I ... am not violating someone else's personal rights") clearly precludes the possiblity that "I should be able to" refers to violating someone else's personal rights. "If I am not doing X, I should be able to do X" is nonsense, even if that were a grammitically possible interpretation. Any comments from linguists? Gary Samuelson
mac@uvacs.UUCP (Alex Colvin) (05/06/85)
> I deleted net.politics and net.legal from the newsgroup list, > and added net.nlang because I want to know if my analysis is > correct. ... > Any comments from linguists? Delete net.nlang from the list too.
jc@mit-athena.UUCP (John Chambers) (05/09/85)
One comment: 'way back in 4th grade (or was it 3rd?), I had teachers that tried to get people to make a distinction between "can" and "may". One linguistic criticism of a statement like: Everyone should be able to <X>. is that, while it may be disirable that everyone be able to do <X>, it is nonsense to insist that a legal or political system give such a right. For example, let <X> be "build a perpetual-motion machine" or "empty Lake Superior with a teaspoon" or "see". I'm sure we'd all agree that everyone who is born has the right to good vision. As for agreeing that everyone should "be able to" carry a weapon; why sure; I think it's downright shameful that there are people without [the use of] arms. I think that everyone should have good, functional arms and hands; at least good enough to [be able to] carry weapons. It's downright cruel of God to allow loss of limbs, not to mention the babies that are born without them. Now as for whether people should be *ALLOWED* to carry weapons in public, well that's another matter entirely. -- John Chambers [...!decvax!mit-athena] He who has made no mistakes has probably made nothing at all.