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Epistemology (2nd draft) (Lyric) by Ranger

Senses tell us much, but thinking tells us more Like the Greek philosopher sitting on the floor Contemplating issues such as morality And if we know anything, and what those things might be Think of the all-seeing fly glued onto the wall Romancing time for peace of mind before his deadly fall When he will question knowledge and what makes it so real Such as the sorts of qualities of his every meal He will wait for a future to fly to him so fast It crashed and got itself buried in the distant past He clears his mind and considers this thing we know as life His meditations were severed by the Idealist knife Cutting rational views its curious nature sought To find the heart of all of our naturally innate thoughts Science beat it there, now the real feud can begin In the end of the fight, though, all of us will win Despite the vicious lure of the coffin's hole Rene Descartes fled with his immortal soul Along the wooden path that boasts no real end Just a vaguely dim request for us to pretend While the external world runs past beyond our sight Socrates left the shadows and then he found the light Sadly for him, his arrogance showed through He would not run from the State and so he paid his due In the bitter cell from which he would not flee The ghost of Christmas Nevermore popped round for a cup of hemlock tea It's much too much, it's far too far, Pretence gave up and screamed Yet your brains remain plugged in to the Great Machine The Matrix some might call it, a name that seems quite odd But not if Descartes proved the existance of God Take a side, consider well, you can't sit on the fence Because there is not such a thing as normal common sense The choice is yours to face the truth here within your head But do you at all believe a single word I said?

ecargo 10-Jan-03/4:48 PM
Oh--yes, now I see. You're omitting the subordinating conjuctions (that) to two restrictive clauses [i.e, "(that) the parsons nose [lubricated]" and "(that) the pirate procured"]. I can't tell from your example above whether you are using "which" to introduce a restrictive or nonrestrictive clause ("that was lubricated by the parson's nose (which the pirate procured)"--if the former, fine; if, however, it's a nonrestrictive clause (i.e., "that was lubricated by the parson's nose, which the pirate procured"), you can't arbitrarily omit both the comma that would indicate that it is a nonrestrictive clause and the "which." (Anyway, because of the ambiguity resulting from your sentence construction, your omission of the subordinating conjuctions, while acceptable in many cases, would be considered unacceptable usage by certain grammarians--see, for example, Theodore Bernstein's _The Careful Writer_).

In order to omit the subordinating conjunctions ("that" or the restrictive usage of "which, which is still acceptable usage, particularly in Europe), I believe the clauses must be restrictive. To be considered restrictive, those clauses must be essential to the meaning of the sentence. If you mean "The shoehorn that the parsons nose that the pirate procured lubricated glistened," you seem to be implying that there is more than one parson's nose and you specifically mean the one that the pirate procured and that there was more than one shoehorn and you specifically mean the one that the parson's nose lubricated. Is that the case? I'd like it better if you changed it to "The shoehorn the parson's nose, the pirate, procured lubricated glistened" but then we'd be back to procuring a lubricated shoehorn, which is against the law in any number of locales.




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