Word: comprehend
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...woefully littered with numbers that defy useful comprehension. Biology, for example, estimates that the human brain contains some 1 trillion cells. But can any imagination get a practical hold on such a quantity? It is easy to picture the symbolic numerals: 1,000,000,000,000. Still, who can comprehend that many individual units of anything at one time? The number teases, dazzles the mind and even dizzies it, but that does not add up to understanding. Biology ought to find out what happens to the brain when it tries to visualize 1 trillion...
...scale. And the ranking of test items in order of difficulty for blacks, he says, is exactly the same as the ranking for whites. "This means the items are working the same way, measuring the same things," says Jensen. It also strongly suggests, he thinks, that blacks and whites comprehend the world in much the same way, despite arguments that "black culture" is so different from "white culture" that separate tests should be constructed...
Mary Ann, a bright, prickly girl, is the author's most important observer, and it might be expected that events would arrange themselves so that she could see, if not wholly comprehend, what happens to the other characters. She does see a good deal, but unfortunately she misses more. 'No one, for instance, knows that Dan and the cheerfully manless Anna were lovers 15 years...
...find the ongoing controversy over fiction Expos both deeply disturbing and difficult to comprehend. The reasons for Mr. Marius's decision to cut Expos 13 and his alternative plans for Expos 18 strike me as misdirected actions to resolve a departmental conflict...
...there are writers who truly comprehend the vocabulary of science. Thomas Pynchon made physical laws part of the structure of Gravity's Rainbow, and science-fiction novelists routinely construct their speculative entertainments from the hard-and software of physics and chemistry. Among the masters of the genre is Stanislaw Lem, a mordant, satirical Pole whose novels and stories have been praised by readers as disparate as Critic Leslie Fiedler and Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Lem has written nearly 30 books, and his European sales are in the millions. (Ten of his works have been translated into English; most...