Word: discerning
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Jake's mother Helen (Frances Sternhagen) is a tyrant of the hearth. She has X-ray eyes, but she can discern no conceivable virtue in anyone who disputes her dictums about food, home furnishings and the proper cowing of a child. She has a deep-freeze heart, and Jake had been stored there until he could be thawed out by externally approved success at the newspaper. For Jake's mother and father, the Times is the Talmud...
...sensitive ears are precisely tuned to discern the scrabble of paws beneath the ground. It even has its own self-cleaning service: cat saliva may contain a deodorizing detergent-like substance. Asleep, a cat may resemble a throw pillow or a Kliban-style meatloaf, but, awake and hungry, the average feline, one of the most highly evolved predators in the natural world, is capable of dispatching a dozen mice at a brief sitting. Alarmingly, it tends to dawdle before administering the coup de grâce. Behavioralists believe this happens because cats are programmed by a primitive, vestigial stalking mechanism...
...season will be taken aback by Harvard's quarterback-in-motion play the formation the Crimson uses most frequently to pass. Backup quarterback Donny Allard--agile and strong-armed--takes the snap, former split end Cuccia flares wide. Callinan looks for a screen pass, and referees try to discern if the play is legal. Quite often, the zebras have decided otherwise. Harvard must avoid its perennial propensity for penalties if it is to stay in The Game against the powerful Elis...
...there seemed to be something else as well, something harder to discern...
...CONCUR with one of the sentiments expressed in the majority position, difficult as it is to discern, buried beneath unneccesarily romanticized rhetoric. Eventual withdrawal of British troops from Norther Ireland will have to be part of any settlement there; immediate extraction of the British forces would undoubtedly lead to bloodshed far worse that that which has in recent years afflicted Northern Ireland. British withdrawl must therefore be part of a broad program for peace worked out by London, Dublin, and Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland. Such a solution would have to include the eventual unification of Ireland, coupled with...