I wear my hair long, but if I'm going to be working around moving machinery, I tie it back and don't dangle it in moving parts.
And I'm very unlikely to get into an altercation with an intoxicated woman, so I'm fairly safe in that respect. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
...
It has _everything_ to do with war. Militaries have regulated hair length and beard length (or even a mandatory clean shave) for centuries, because even the Phoenicians knew what a convenient hand-hold either one is.
I saw a guy in the NFL get pulled down by his hair, and it wasn't a foul, because the defender hadn't grabbed his face mask, horse-collared him, or clotheslined him, but pulled him down by his own body part, as if he'd had his arm or something. It was the guy's hair, but the NFL ruled that if he's stupid enough to leave it dangle out of his hat like that, that it's fair game.
I wear my hair long, but I go to great lengths (pun unintended, but noted) to avoid altercations with drunks. :-)
Cheers! Rich
Would you trust one of these?
Nope. The first part of the amendment is a well regulated militia. It is mentioned first, not as an add on, not as an afterthought, but as the introductory clause of the piece. It sets out HOW and WHY it must not be infringed. The context of when infringement takes place. It sets limits. If you want to include the last part, you can't pretend that the first doesn't exist.
Hokay. As I said, the construction is uncommon but you'll recognize these familiar examples:
(From The American Heritage Book of English Usage, "Absolute Construction"):
"No other business arising, the meeting was adjourned." "The paint now dry, we brought the furniture out on the deck." "The truck finally loaded, they said goodbye to their neighbors and drove off." "The horse loped across the yard, her foal trailing behind her." "The picnic is scheduled for Saturday, weather permitting." "Barring bad weather, we plan to go to the beach tomorrow." "All things considered, it's not a bad idea."
Note that in some of these, the ones about the horse and her foal and the one about the picnic, the absolute phrase is almost, but not quite, incidental. The foal did not restrict the horse from loping across the yard, so far as we can tell. The weather may decide if we have the picnic, but it doesn't change the fact that the picnic is scheduled for Saturday.
We brought the furniture out on the deck at least partly because the paint was dry. We would not have done so if it wasn't, probably, so the dryness of the paint in this case is logically (but not grammatically) restrictive. The good idea is logically, but not grammatically, connected to the idea that we have considered all things. It still would have been a good idea if we had not considered all things, in all likelihood, but the sentence is ambiguous on this point.
Is it clearing up? The nominative absolute allows a variety of logical connections between the phrase and the clause.
(Here's one I picked up online):
"High heels clattering on the pavement, the angry women marched toward the mayor's office."
The women were marching regardless of whether their heels were clattering.
I hope this is enough to satisfy what you're looking for. I should point out that the nominative absolute is a slightly controversial issue to grammarians, but it may appear that way because some don't like the fact that it's derived from Latin, in which the parallel to the English nominative absolute is the "ablative absolute," and it really works better in Latin than in English.
In English, the construction has always been rare. Linguists say it started when early literary writers tried to adopt Latin constructions. John Milton used in heavily in _Paradise Lost_. But it has never, otherwise, been common.
Why the FFs used it is a good question. It's a literary device whose meaning depends on context. But the 2nd has no context. My guess, after years of studying it, is that it was an intentional ambiguity.
You probably noticed that Gunner made a point of the commas, which many writers have done over the years. The commas would be an issue if the grammatical question was whether the phrase is restrictive or not. But that's not the issue. Absolute constructions -- the nominative absolute, in this case -- have no grammatical relationship to the rest of their sentences. They have various logical connections but "absolute" means they are grammatically self-contained, or not connected. Once it's absolute, there is no "restrictive" or "unrestrictive."
The point is that the commas don't matter. If the sentence of the 2nd Amendment were written today, we would not use the first comma, but the meaning would be identical to the original. The use of such "ear-based" commas has declined but the meaning remains the same.
I have some definitions of nominative absolute that may help but I hope the examples clear it up.
-- Ed Huntress
It's not a clause. No predicate. It's a nominative absolute phrase.
See my message to clifto. You can make no such assumptions.
It could just as well set a sufficient but not necessary condition, which, after decades of studying it, is exactly what I think was intended.
Neither can you draw any conclusions about what relationship it has to the clause just from the sentence itself.
Pure guesswork. You can make no such assumption with a nominative absolute construction. You need to know the context, and there is no context.
-- Ed Huntress
They have a blade with the stop jambed in it at the local Woodcraft store signed by an ukulele maker who got to keep all his fingers, so I'd say it works. I'd still be just as carefull as I would with any other table saw. Karl
Jings that's a shame. I'm as devastated as the day that I heard the local accordion factory had been saved from a fire.
| They have a blade with the stop jambed in it at the local Woodcraft | store signed by an ukulele maker who got to keep all his fingers, so | I'd say it works. I'd still be just as carefull as I would with any | other table saw.
From _Systemantics_:
When a failsafe system fails, it fails by failing to fail /safe/.
-- Morris Dovey DeSoto Solar DeSoto, Iowa USA
Also to prevent major lice infestations.
Cops used to wear uniform shirts with those nifty epaulets on the shoulders. Great hand holds for the bad guys.
I cut mine loose and put velcro on the shirt and epaulets. First bad ass to grab one as he had so many before, stood there staring at it with a surprised and stupid look on his face, long enough for me to chop him down like an oak with my baton.
Gunner
How times have changed. When I started, I wore a Sam Browne belt with the leather shoulder strap over a dress blouse. It wasn't until the 70's when the strap became a hazard, and we became pigs, that it was removed.
After a Computer crash and the demise of civilization, it was learned Gunner wrote on Wed, 12 Sep 2007 23:07:28
-0700 in rec.crafts.metalworking :
But being raped or robbed, let alone murdered, by someone using something other than a firearm, is morally superior, don'tcha know.
Personally, I think these neo-luddites should be forced to do away with other modern labor saving devices, in addition to firearms. It will keep them busy, and in much better shape physically. Not sure it will improve their mental capacity, but then conservatives aren't really into that whole "reeducation through labor" thing. We're more inclined towards "the idle brain is the devil's workshop".
tschus pyotr
-- pyotr filipivich "Quemadmoeum gladuis neminem occidit, occidentis telum est. " Lucius Annaeus Seneca, circa 45 AD (A sword is never a killer, it is a tool in the killer's hands.)
I can hear the sound of splintering wood and breaking glass now! And the wan and pitiful sound of someone who is about to disappear forever screaming that they have rights.
The way I read it is, "Since it is necessary that the militia be well-regulated, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
What this means that it is the duty of the well-armed citizenry to keep the militia from turning itself into a police state. In other words, it's the duty of the citizens to do the actual regulating.
For example, when the militia man shows up with his squad and says, "We're going to confiscate all of your guns and burn all of your subversive books", you can lock and load, aim, look him in the eye, and say, "Guess again, bucko!"
Unfortunately, these days it seems that too many people are willing to throw away their Liberty in exchange for the illusion of security.
Thanks, Rich
On Sat, 15 Sep 2007 16:56:28 -0400, Ed Huntress wrote: ...
It won't do any good - the confiscators, neosocialist and neonazi alike, simply want absolute power, and are incapable of reason.
Cheers! Rich
On Sun, 16 Sep 2007 11:58:06 +0000, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com top-posted:
According to "Ask This Old House", you also have to push your work with a weiner. ;-)
Cheers! Rich
I suppose that's as good an interpretation as any. One of the beauties of the 2nd, and of many such sentences, is that you can read into it what you want -- and it's clear that people do just that.
Taking into account what the FFs were trying to accomplish with the Bill of Rights, I firmly believe that the 2nd was intended to be ambiguous, while, at the same time, drawing attention to what was then the most uniformly agreed upon argument in favor of a right to bear arms. After the Revolutionary War, no state legislature would argue the point, and that was the desired result.
But the history of the issue over the decades preceding the B of R suggests that the most common argument (although not, possibly, the most forceful one) was an individual right to self-defense. Why the FFs didn't seize on that one, we can only guess. A key point is that there was no debate over the right itself. It was a no-brainer at the time.
-- Ed Huntress
In message , Ed Huntress writes
blah blah
excuse me girls, can you please remove uk.d-i-y from your x-posts
thanks in anticipation that you are intelligent enough to do this
Sure, Geoff. We wouldn't want you to know this stuff, anyway. You might be dangerous if you did. d8-)
-- Ed Huntress
In message , Ed Huntress writes
Another stupid septic ...
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