Well, milum, 16 oz of any liquor sounds like a sure fire way to stimulate the brain for a night, and destroy it for about 24 hours the next day. (I get some serious hangovers these days with any anabasis beyond the pale of moderation.)
RE: comprehend vs apprehend. I use the former as well, in fact far more often than the latter. I tend to think of comprehend in the context of grasping the literal meaning of something. "I tried following the directions but I couldn't comprehend the manual." To apprehend, on the other hand, I tend to think of as to understand or recognize something subtle or unspoken.
Bartleby.com summarizes this better than I can:
Only in the “understand” sense are these words synonyms, although apprehend seems to stress understanding in the sense of “recognizing” (He seems to have apprehended, finally, that he has no standing in the case), whereas comprehend seems to stress understanding as “the intellectual process required to achieve comprehension” (After studying the various proposals, we finally comprehended what all the fuss was about).
But my original question is, where did the fear connotation of apprehensive creep in? Anybody out there with an OED care to educate me?
