People nonetheless accepted them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things.
A few things - what actually happened in the Big Bang, how living, replicating things emerged from a muddle of organic compounds - remain riddles.
"I've got my pipe," he told his audience, his speech slightly muddled by the stem, "because we're going to speak about schoolish kind of things".
Two aspects of Guardiola's status potentially muddle things in terms of Mourinho's immediate future.
Meanwhile, the futurists dream, the neo-Luddites moan, the politicians stutter and the rest of us muddle along, hoping things will turn out OK.
His character just adds to the muddle of the ending, and that is not a good thing.
Mindful of how the press "muddle things", her words come carefully.
But biology (endorphins, limbic back alleys) also pushes us into human relationships and encounters (erotic, amorous) that have a way of messing things up — this is the "heft, bruise, and hopeless muddle of the world's irreducible particulars".
Politics is a muddle of moral and practical compromise.
In the usual muddle of gloom and relief.
