"Parse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... evening, and when we saw on the bill of fare half broiled chicken, we innocently supposed that the word half was an adjective modifying the compound noun, broiled-chicken. Instead, to our sorrow and disappointment, it proved to be an adverb modifying broiled (we hope we parse the matter correctly). At any rate, the wretched fowl was blue and pallid, a little smoked on the exterior, raw and sinewy within, and an affront to the whole profession of innkeeping. Whereupon, in the days that followed, looking back ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... Legislatures are apt to use very slip-shod English in drafting their bills. This should not be. How can they expect to Parse a bill unless it ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... well-educated children, and, in many respects, knew more than most girls and boys who were older than they. Harry had been taught by his father to ride and to swim and to shoot as carefully as his school-teacher had taught him to spell and to parse. And he was not only taught to be skillful in these outdoor pursuits, but to be prudent, and kind-hearted. When he went gunning, he shot birds and game that were fit for the table; and when he rode, he remembered ...
— What Might Have Been Expected • Frank R. Stockton
... an apology is necessary, for having opened it in conformity with the, now neglected, rules of history—that we should try and snatch something from the wreck of antiquity." [We cheerfully offer a reward of one copy of the present number of the "Atlantic" to any person who will parse the last sentence, explain the punctuation of it, and interpret its meaning.] "In other countries, the standard of history has been steadily rising for centuries; but with us, it has been so lowered, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... question in your recent numbers brings to mind some "thats" I had when I went to school long years ago, and which some of your young grammarians may never have seen. I would like to have them, especially C.P.S., of Chicago, parse them. ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... 'When I was a lad,' he said, 'there was a couplet in my grammar that I often had to parse, which ran in ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Grammar (Macmillans, 1s.), with Mr. John Wetherell's Exercises on Morris's English Grammar (same publishers and price), very useful, and, though they are small books, quite adequate to your needs. Both can be mastered in a month. The first business is to learn to parse. To parse is "to explain the duty each word performs in a sentence: that is, to tell the relation each word bears to the rest in a sentence:" the definition clearly shows how indispensable to a writer is some skill in parsing. Of course ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... the Titles and Descriptions by heart, which he will more easily do, by reason of these impressions which the viewing of the pictures hath already made in his memory. And now let him also learn, 1.To construe, or give the words one by one, as they answer one another in Latin and English. 2.To Parse, according to the rules, (which I presume by this time) he hath learn'd in the first part of his Accidence; where I would have him tell what part of Speech any word is, and then what accidents belong to it; but especially to decline ...
— The Orbis Pictus • John Amos Comenius
... troubled record. When the morning broke through the dull gray of the eastern sky rim, he would be a heartless surgeon of emotions who attempted to probe the pathos of their thoughts, and a dull and vulgar rhetorician who should attempt to parse the fathomless sorrow of ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... can speak it, and read it, and write it, and think it.... Now don't you think that if a girl can do that—if she can learn thousands and thousands of new words, how to pronounce them, and spell them, and parse them, and inflect them—how to supply hundreds of rules of grammar—and if she can learn to do this so well that she can chat away in French without giving it a thought—don't you think she might be able to learn something ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... schools go on their complacent way, teaching words, words, words that are utterly devoid of meaning to the pupils, and, sad to relate, seem to think their mission accomplished. The pupils are required to spell words, define words, write words, and parse words day after day as if these words were lifeless and meaningless blocks of wood to be merely tossed up and down and moved hither and thither. So soon as a word becomes instinct with life and meaning, it kindles the child's interest at its every recurrence ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... prefer the minute reading of a few masterpieces to a wide general knowledge, and a typical university announces that "in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books as less important than the ability to write good English" that will parse and that is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of English literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful, look with a certain condescension. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall |
