Medicine was once understood as a moral profession, with physicians as paladins against disease.
Still, the pressure is on to improve something that was once understood to be a lucky side effect to procreation.
The band was once understood as jazz musicians breaking out of traditional roles and taking the next evolutionary step.
It was once understood that men who left the priesthood would relocate at least 500 miles from where anyone might recognize them as priests.
The concept was once understood as rescue from eternal damnation, but in the Age of Anxiety salvation amounts to rescue from meaninglessness.
Nearly half of the American economy is now in financial services — an industry without a product, as "product" was once understood — and many people who have made their fortune in finance are looking for long-term investments in tangible property.
It was once understood that your own most-intimate photographs of your children, or the movies that you made of them, would be shown to other family members and to (bored) friends.
But underlying them all is what was once understood to be a basic fact: these battered and luckless wanderers carried with them a set of peculiar principles that slowly unfolded into a spectacularly successful experiment in freedom, prosperity and human dignity, something unforeseen and without parallel in all history.
In addition, names may cease to be understood as a result of language change; e.g., the place-name Birmingham was understandable in Old English as "habitation of Biorma's people," and the originally Germanic name Gerard was once understood as "strong spear" (Ger-hardo).
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