They're cute musical teaching toys for television-weaned grownups in which every syllable is asserted with the emphatic cheeky clarity of a friendly clown teaching the alphabet.
This is asserted with cold dispassion, dismissing any argument of "disease" (a word she rejects "like ebola"), putting her in a camp that believes defining addiction as such somehow removes the involvement of any free will.
With his tilted-back head and sharp stare, he seems to be asserting, with an edge of challenge: "I am here".
Within a few minutes, they had finished one game and were launched on another, and Fischer was asserting, with a triumphant grin, as he pushed his queen, "You're dead now".
More recently, however, commentators have been asserting, with escalating intensity, that Tehran's heyday is over.
But the sons and daughters were to be chaste, and the old prohibitions were to be asserted with increasing stridency.
It can be asserted with some confidence that common opinion is certainly an unreliable guide about what exists, if indeed it can be induced to pronounce on this matter at all.
Brooke Davis Anderson, the museum's curator of contemporary art, has selected from the permanent collection some 60 works in which formal, material and procedural elements are asserted with particular vigor.
Until they have read the full shortlist, people complaining about concerted stupidification must concede – like this column – that it cannot be asserted with certainty that the prize has made a sudden grab for Richard and Judy territory.
'Talk is about actions on discrete symbol parts, and these processes are asserted, with substantiation that relies on perceptual features'.
