Word: discerner
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...repeat: This country is going to [poop]. First, the Grammy nominations embarrassed us all by nominating Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and Christina Aguilera repeatedly (wait, didn't they give Celine Dion Best Album a couple years back?). And now, the Oscars prove once again that they cannot discern solid filmmaking from overindulgent hype. The voters only got two of the five Best Picture nominees right--American Beauty and The Insider. Because Oscar voters are voters for life, they all tend to be very, very old (I bet It's a Wonderful Life gets a few write-in votes every...
...Natalies are most bothered by sneaky devotees desperately hoping to glean information through questions such as, "Which high school did you go to?" or "What is your concentration?"--simply hoping to discern Portman's address without directly saying the P-word. Others pretend to be prefrosh with eager questions about attending Harvard or some clever lovers "mistakenly" chose Portman as a random e-mail confidante...
...cheat on standardized tests. Some hinted broadly at correct answers while students were taking the test; others used the scrap-paper method to avoid the multiple erasures that often indicate cheating; a few even changed answers after their students turned in the exams. The motive is not hard to discern. Teachers, particularly in the early grades, are increasingly being measured by the test scores of their students and can lose their jobs if student performance is too low and shows no sign of improvement...
...turn his weakness into a virtue. He's not a policy wonk, so he has to rely on people who are." And there is a risk to that approach, adds Buchanan, who is an admirer: "Bush's biggest weakness is that he might not be in a position to discern the credibility of the options his advisers...
Language as it evolves is like the game of Broken Telephone, in which a whispered phrase gets increasingly distorted as it passes from lip to ear. Eventually speakers no longer discern the rule behind a motley set of mangled verbs. They just memorize them as a list, as do subsequent generations. These are the irregulars, the fossils of dead rules...