As the 19th-century artist and writer Abraham Wivell put it, It is, as I may say, the key to unlock and detect almost all the impositions that have, at various times, arrested so much of public attention.
Any of Israel's actions taken following the 2006 election - involvement in an attempted coup, air strikes, and above all the imposition of a general blockade - are classic examples of acts of war.
Because we put on all these impositions on ourselves and essentially got no credit for actually doing that," he said in the interview.
Both Judge Garrity and the then mayor of Boston, Kevin White, who reluctantly supported the busing decision, were Irish, which made the imposition all that much harder to take.
Whereas most comics are desperate to impress, Smith tends to turn up onstage looking like this is all a massive imposition and that he'd rather be anywhere else, before knocking the audience down with impeccably crafted, casually delivered jokes.
But once we move beyond these obstacles, far deeper in the bitter concoction translators are fated to imbibe is the redeeming awareness that despite all the insults and impositions translation sustains in our culture, it is crucial to our sense of ourselves as human.
It was without any apparent irony that those who blamed the media for Diana's death so quickly demanded that the 15-year-old William be immediately elevated to be next in line to the throne, with all the pressures and impositions that would entail.
Finally, perhaps the most striking decision of all: the imposition of a kind of internal martial law, whereby "all normal party meetings at CLP and branch level shall be suspended until the completion of the leadership election".
But it's not all about imposition.
Among the hundreds of amendments being proposed on the Senate floor are an even stricter ban on proprietary trading than originally envisaged, caps on debit- and credit-card "interchange" fees, higher deposit-insurance fees for big banks, and (potentially most serious of all) the imposition of fiduciary duties on marketmakers.Many of these will not pass, but those that have are stringent.
All this despite the imposition of increasingly broad sanctions by both the United States and the European Union and a marked slowing of the Russian economy.
