Word: comprehend
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...letters of Eleanor and her oldest child Anna, is a book whose surprises are more quiet, but a reader who has become fascinated by E.R. will not want to miss it. The collection traces a warm relationship, though Anna was aware that her mother did not always comprehend human weaknesses, and utterly failed to understand, for instance, why F.D.R., during World War II, insisted on having a 20-minute cocktail break before dinner. But there was no pomposity to this doer of what Lash, quoting George Eliot, calls "deeds of daring rectitude." Anna recalled that toward...
...speed, he did not order a crew member to yank the traditional brass-handled lever. Instead, he spoke through a microphone to the ship's computerized engine control, which has a voice synthesizer and recognition device developed by Japan's Sodensha Electronics Ltd. The control device can comprehend eleven verbal commands, from "Full ahead" to "Full astern," given by the captain or two of his officers. To show that an order has been received, the machine repeats it in a flat voice reminiscent of Hal, the talking computer in the movie...
...astonished Lee. In two cases, stories provide a mirror effect. Isaac Babel's The Death of Dolgushov concerns the inability of men fully to apprehend the griefs and atrocities of battle; Doris Lessing's Homage for Isaac Babel is about the inability of children to comprehend the depths and subtleties of Babel's deceptively plain fictions. But most of the tales are discrete, ironic parables, works, as Irving Howe describes them, "brought to a stark conclusion-abrupt, bleeding, exhausting...
...were sure. Then, in a flash that illuminated the New Mexico desert for miles around, the atomic era began, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team of Los Alamos scientists realized that they had pulled off the most astonishing scientific achievement of the century. Only later did they truly comprehend the extent to which they had released an evil genie from its bottle that neither they, nor anyone else, could ever put back...
...same time, certain aspects of thinking can be identified without encompassing the entire process. The ability to comprehend, to conceptualize, to organize and reorganize, to manipulate, to adjust-these are all parts of thought. So are the acts of pondering, rationalizing, worrying, brooding, theorizing, contemplating, criticizing. One thinks when one imagines, hopes, loves, doubts, fantasizes, vacillates, regrets. To experience greed, pride, joy, spite, amusement, shame, suspicion, envy, grief-all these require thought; as do the decisions to take command, or umbrage; to feel loyalty or inhibitions; to ponder ethics, self-sacrifice, cowardice, ambition. So vast is the mind...