Word: fathoming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Seventy years ago, in The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad described an act of anarchist terrorism as "a blood-stained inanity of so fatuous a kind that it was impossible to fathom its origin by any reasonable or even unreasonable process of thought." Today West Germans, in ordeals of introspection and defensive truculence, are trying to understand the almost autistic fury of their own terrorists. Why should their country-its political system stable and democratic, its wealth distributed reasonably well, its society open and obsessively moderate -have produced the murderous young of the Baader-Meinhof gang and the Red Army Faction...
...high point of the second half came when the SRO crowd collectively flipped through their programs in the closing minutes in an attempt to fathom the pronunciation of Crimson sub Frank Konstantynowicz's name...
...promised myself not to write anything about the football team, because I find the 1977 version of the gridders about as hard to fathom as those little plastic and metal model kits that Chem 20 students play around with...
...often most difficult to fathom the characters of those who are superficially very similar to one and yet actually possess that single unknown quality that defies explanation. That is how many of Thrace's neighbors must have felt. The Greeks, for example, were both baffled and obsessed by the Thracians, and so labelled them "barbarians." The Trojan War was waged largely to gain control of Thrace's Hellespont (the Dardanelles). So there were definite strategic motives for heeding that nation. And yet it put forward, in some regions, what to the Greeks seemed bizarre notions, particularly about death...
Judge Thomas J. MacBride apparently could not fathom any overwhelming reason, and, citing potential "irreparable injury" to Clancy, ordered Davis to admit her, at least temporarily. A U.S. Ninth Circuit panel refused to overrule MacBride, and university officials agreed last week to allow Clancy to pursue her studies, pending the outcome of the Bakke challenge. In all likelihood, Bakke's fate notwithstanding, Mrs. Clancy will thus become Dr. Clancy...