Word: fathoming
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Moscow's stubbornness was hard to fathom. Though Hess had been an early Nazi zealot, he had never wielded any real power, and he was already behind bars in England when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Ironically, his friendship with Hitler had developed in jail: the two men met in Landsberg Prison after the aborted Nazi putsch in 1923. There Hitler dictated Mein Kampf to Hess. Though Hitler later made Hess his deputy, he never took him seriously or delegated authority to him. At Nuremberg, the judges found Hess not guilty of war crimes or crimes against...
Over the years, Jackson's motives have been difficult to fathom. He works out his anxieties alone. He is a masterly manipulator and loves to turn people on and off. One minute he melts listeners with his charm, the next he withdraws. He describes himself as bicultural. He grew up on the black side of the tracks, but worked across town for whites. His language can change rapidly from moralizing preacher to street hustler. He lets no one too close. Most white political leaders have little confidence in his word. No matter what the brooding preacher promises...
Robert Frost wrote Fire and Ice in 1923, some four decades before astrophysicists were able to fathom how the sun -- and thus the earth -- would die. Nonetheless, he was basically correct: first fire, then ice. The fire will not be an explosion like the one now brightening the Large Magellanic Cloud; the sun is thought to have only about a tenth of the mass necessary to become a Type II supernova and has no stellar companion to contribute the mass necessary to turn it into a Type I blast. But that will be of little comfort to whatever creatures exist...
...contemporary listener, the mystique seems hard to fathom. The core of Toscanini's repertoire was small -- Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner made up 40% of his New York Philharmonic programs; Puccini and Verdi were favorites in the opera house -- and his interest in contemporary music, aside from fellow Italians like Respighi, was almost nil. The famous RCA recordings of the Beethoven symphonies now sound febrile and coarse. Even the conductor's notorious temper and torrents of epithets, which once seemed so romantically apposite -- no musician had really lived until Toscanini called him Porco! (pig) -- come off today as operatic posturing...
Because, say the critics, the contras cannot do the job. They cannot win. How these experts divine the outcome of civil wars is hard to fathom. The contras have more than twice the recruits the Sandinistas had when they overthrew Somoza. Which side is today more popular? It is hard to find out in a dictatorship. But it is worth noting that the Sandinistas have a conscript army, while the contras are a volunteer force...