"We come here on this line every day trying to ascertain something that can assist us to get through the night".
Sometimes the commercials are fun, or funny, or just befuddling, but we're interested not just because we want to be entertained but because we think we can ascertain something about our popular culture by examining our million-dollar-a-minute advertisements.
There are varying forms of irony, but the easiest way to ascertain if something is ironic is to determine whether what actually happens differs from your expectations.
From the rest of Twitter, which got very active at 10.31pm, I ascertained that the something is not nice.
To walk through a landscape in pursuit of an idea, in the belief that I will learn something that I don't already know, that there is something in this vast expanse that cannot be ascertained from just a mental understanding of the thing.
As Jessica found out, sexual chemistry is something that can really only be ascertained by, well, having sex.
The second question, "What is the maximum time (minutes) you are prepared to travel to see a GP (for something that wasn't an emergency)?" ascertained a measure of maximum travel time.
Sexual orientation -- that great proclivity of ours to love, whether or not that love takes place within gendered parameters -- is not something that can be measured, confirmed, or ascertained on a penis machine.
Something very important about the watch is not readily ascertained at a glance.
We were engrossed in trying to ascertain the origin of something on a skewer when I felt a faint brush against my shoulder bag and turned around to see a woman dart off into the crowd.
Johnson: No, again, we were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that -- an assault sprang out of that -- and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn't know that.
