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.
The concept was once understood as rescue from eternal damnation, but in the Age of Anxiety salvation amounts to rescue from meaninglessness.
Strictly interpreted, this conception might imply that whatever is once understood has become a piece of knowledge, and thus guides our action (see I. Hadot 1969, 106).
One of the big tobacco companies has a fellow who, as I understand it, was once a private eye and was hired to catch up with Jimmy Hoffa's doings a few years ago.
"I think my first encounter with psychedelics was looking at Colorado and trying to understand that it was once the shores of an ocean with hundred-foot-long sauropods tromping through the mangrove swamps," he told Details magazine in 1993.
That something else was once generally understood to be Christianity.
Some government investigators even suggested that once it was fully understood, Mr. Lee's role was comparable to that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed as Soviet spies in 1953.
