Construance

That is the language of the organic act, and if the Journal insists on a strict construance of the paragraph it will mean that the territorial legislature has power over supreme courts as well as the inferior courts referred to, and if the legislature has power to create county courts it has the power and it is its duty to create a supreme court.

The construance has been, it is complained by the president’s critics, that the innocent have been made to suffer while the guilty ones—the actual murderers—have escaped with a penalty that is a travesty.

The counselor’s agreement with the client’s construances of events communicates a positive attitude toward the client.

The purpose of science is to generate intersubjectively valid and pragmatically useful construances of reality … over the generations, constraints on the method of inquiry have evolved, mainly to counteract the basic human tendencies to interpret events within one’s preconceptions and to act such as to create what one expects.

The Mǎ reading of 12:1, like the grammatically normal (if interpretatively problematic) “and” reading of 9:1, is the likely solution, whereas the later suggestions are ingenuities based on technically possible but contextually awkward construances of one word.

Picking at the fine construances of words—half of which come to us through translations of dubious accuracy—would be no ally to our need for alacrity.