Can I ask a dumb English question?

[Shelly in IL]

What does parse mean? I mean - I've always been pretty good in English and taken higher level courses and all - but I just don't know about this. Anyone care to enlighten me? Thanks

[Mom to Aly]

It means to examine really closely, in general, or, to take a sentence and break it up into the separate parts of speech and describe each one grammatically, or the syntactical relationships of each. (big in linguistic classes, of which I've had a few).

[Carrie1234]

Gee, I don't know if you *can, but you *may. ;)