Word: understood
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...have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks, who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering,” he wrote in his essay, “Walking...
...make a collection for you of all the past parings of my nails." The French had spent decades producing theories on liberty and equality, for which they regularly enjoyed stays in the Bastille. Franklin had produced no such theses but put those combustible ideas into practice. He was dimly understood to be an American general; he was so much an anomaly in socially inert France that he was repeatedly addressed as Monsieur de Franklin. This frontier philosopher was dripping in honorary degrees. He wrung a great deal of mileage out of being thought a Quaker, which he was not. Every...
...countrymen, who almost universally found the Paris posting a Calvary and who were vocal on the subject. One swore he would prefer a farm in America to a dukedom in France. Adams wailed that he would rather be a doorman in Congress. Among his torments was Franklin himself, who understood that some American qualities--piety, earnestness, efficiency--did not go far in 18th century France. Franklin remained at all times a pragmatist and an astonishingly flexible thinker. He was realistic about the prospects of conducting business in a land of radically different habits. "It is vexing for men of spirit...
...before our voyage came to an end, some of us took up the offer to camp overnight on the ice. The temperature that southern summer evening dipped to a balmy -3?C, and the perfect silence of the sky enveloped me like a blanket. It was then that I understood the quote by Apsley Cherry-Garrand, the 24-year-old member of Captain R.F. Scott's tragic 1910 expedition. "Polar exploration," he wrote, "is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has ever been devised." And what a beautifully, wonderfully bad time...
...Berlusconi, if I understood him correctly, invited me to appear as the commandant of a concentration camp...