Word: discerning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...suppose he was right when he said there was far too much shoplifting in Dublin but I am not clear how one calculates what is the right amount of shoplifting for Dublin." He took figures of speech literally and then offered advice on solving problems that only he could discern: how to keep blood from curdling, what to do about Ireland's excessive-burning of midnight...
POMME, THE HEROINE of Claude Goretta's The Lacemaker, has a face you might pass a hundred times without noticing, only to discover on the hundredth-and-first passing that it is indeed beautiful. Simple in feature and freckled, the face must be studied carefully before you begin to discern a hesitant glimmer in the eye and a warmth in the smile. You could call it childlike, but there is a certain melancholy under the surface...
...patient searchers discern more and more about early man and his predecessors, they also may gain an ever-widening insight about modern man, his nature, his failings and his future. Most major anthropologists reject the notion popularized by Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) and others that man is inherently aggressive and that his murderous instincts derive from his apelike origins. Indeed, they have found no evidence in their digs that man was anything but a peaceable hunter-gatherer before the invention of agriculture some 10,000 years ago. It was farming, they believe, that created settlers with property to protect...
...details of the conquistadors' movement: the absurdity of their costumes in the humid sun, their lack of respect for their Indian slaves, their devotion to the cross, their reliance on weaponry, their confidence. No one talks as they slog through the mud: the audience is left to discern on its own the nature of their journey, to predict their success from the stand-point of uninformed, unaided observers...
...last several weeks about 1,000 letters a week urging stronger support for Israel have poured into the White House. Important Senators have chimed in on the same theme. Two weeks ago, when he got a phone call from White House Aide Hamilton Jordan, Rabbi Schindler began to discern a change in mood. Says he: "Then I knew that the question of American-Israeli relations had become a serious political matter, and they weren't treating us as if we were part of a foreign relations department. Carter was beginning to perceive the importance of wooing the American Jewish...