"I've been grappling with the problem," said a friend, and I knew what she meant. She was struggling with the problem, trying to understand and resolve it.
What I didn't know, until just now, when I looked it up, is that the word is also a noun. It's a set of hooks attached to a rope. When a ship in war want to seize another ship, they throw the grapple to the other ship, and then pull. See the picture below.
Interesting, isn't it, how one word comes to mean something quite different from what it started as!
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