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• n  understanding with difficulty
  the lecture was beyond his most strenuous graspings
• n  the act of gripping something firmly with the hands (or the tentacles)
• v  hold firmly
• v  get the meaning of something
• s  immoderately desirous of acquiring e.g. wealth
  a grasping old miser
  grasping commercialism

• But there is comfort in better grasping what has gone wrong, and enlightenment for those around you when they grasp it too.
• Artificial hands are often hooklike, limited to simple open and close gestures, but the iLimb has more subtle capabilities, like a credit-card grip for grasping narrow objects.
• So our fascination with the crime becomes a populist mania: an obsession with the wreckage of the rich and famous, comeuppance for hubris, a communal grasping for a moral to a .

• taking hold
• seizing
• prehension
• grasp
• hold on
• grok
• get the picture
• comprehend
• savvy
• dig
• compass
• apprehend
• avaricious
• covetous
• grabby
• greedy
• prehensile

News & Articles

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• Drip, drip, drip for Bob McDonnell
  So far, we still only have a tale of unseemly middle-class grasping, but damage has been done.
  June 26, 2013 - Washington Post
• SIU breaks ground on new baseball facility
  CARBONDALE — With one arm firmly grasping the past, the SIU baseball program took a gigantic step into the future Tuesday afternoon, breaking ground on Richard “Itchy” Jones Stadium.
  June 26, 2013 - The Southern Illinoisan
• YouTube Explains Copyright In The Best Way Possible
  Copyright law is confusing. Even lawyers have trouble grasping copyright law, so it stands to reason that regular ol’ content producers on YouTube would have trouble as well. Don’t worry – YouTube and its puppet pals are here to help. …
  June 25, 2013 - WebProNews

Quotes

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• Patrick Leahy in Wall Street Journal (blog)
  We see a lot of people putting up red herrings and grasping at strawsto try to defeat Kagan, Leahy told AP, predicting that Kagan would be confirmed.
• Harry Reid in Bloomberg
  Incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said in a statement that Bush "is grasping for a victory his current policies have put out of reach, and leaving our troops stuck policing a civil war."
• Ibrahim Hooper in San Diego Union Tribune
  Perhaps it's evidence of a long-shot candidate grasping at straws and trying to create some kind of a controversy that might appeal to a niche audience of anti-Muslim bigots,said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic...