Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...difficult to comprehend the type of student who has neither regard for property rights nor the code of honour among users of the University Library. Even more does the lack of any sense of value displayed by these Vandals challenge explanation. At its best, this sort of thing is reminiscent of the penciled moustache on the High School statue of Apollo; at its worst it approaches the mentality of the urchin who chalks his meagre store of profanity on fences and telegraph poles...
This belief led to the establishment, some fifteen years ago, of a field of concentration known as History and Literature. It was felt that one could scarcely comprehend the true significance of any period in the world's development merely by an examination of the important events of its history, of its constitutional development or of its foreign policy. One must also know what the people of that period thought, what they talked about, with what problems their intellects were busy. One could, it is true, write an extremely valuable and accurate history of Boston compiled wholly from the archives...
...finished the single column that remains, one wishes that he had hesitated longer. In striving for a judicial tone he is led to say that Joel Rogers's verse is bolstered by music, "rick music"--"and by sincerity". Munificent patronage,--but a betrayal of his incapacity to comprehend the very word. One of his phrases, "intellectualized prose" is enough to prove that prose can be deintellectualized...
This reaction, blurred in all cases by local issues, is not a complete repudiation of socialistic tendencies, but is an expedient adopted because socialism in practice has been found an idea with too few heads to comprehend. There still remains in opposition a strong liberal element which will ride the wagon but not steer...
Minute as this position appears, there is no reason to be overcome with dizziness in reading the figures. In mathematics and philosophy "infinity" is referred to so often and so casually that it becomes a commonplace. And infinity is far more difficult to comprehend than a comparatively small number like 660,000,000,000,000,000 miles, the distance to the Magellanic Cloud at present. It would take 1,130,000,000,000 years of constant walking to cover the distance, or--in more familiar terms,--a Dudley Street car might make it in 1,134,000,000,000 years...