Whether Lucy or Alice is narrating, Mangan's diction has the archaic gentility of someone incorrectly imagining how previous generations thought and spoke.
Mr. Tasini, a labor leader who once successfully sued The Times on behalf of freelance writers, is the politically impractical candidate from the left that many commentators incorrectly imagined Ned Lamont to be when he challenged Mr. Lieberman in Connecticut.
One might thus imagine — incorrectly of course — that the hardness of ice depends only on water molecules being at rest with respect to one another, the fluidity of water only on water molecules moving with respect to one another at a moderate speed, and the etherealness of a cloud only on water molecules moving with an extreme relative speed.
Most imagine, incorrectly, that losing the next election will make them miserable.
And restrictions on sublets — which can vary drastically — can be glossed over by buyers who may imagine, probably incorrectly, that they will live in their new apartment happily ever after.
For modern Western readers, "The less accurately we know the time, the place and the circumstances in the background, the more liable we are to imagine it incorrectly, and the result will be that we either misunderstand the poem or fail to understand it altogether".
More often than not, we imagine that future incorrectly.
"It's hard to fathom how much human-level AI could benefit society, and it's equally hard to imagine how much it could damage society if built or used incorrectly," is the parallel message posted on OpenAI's launch page from December 2015.
Imagine that whole framework of thinking in a James Bond world if handled incorrectly.
"You can imagine the case where a businessman's trip gets delayed because his passport details were incorrectly entered and he was mistaken for a terrorist.
