ascribe

When she died of the plague a few years later, they felt vindicated; one particularly judgy saint ascribed it to her use of a “certain golden instrument.”

“And that’s really disappointing and discouraging to a lot of female politicians who don’t ascribe to that type of behavior.”

Their “internal conflict, depression, and anxiety” is ascribed solely to urges “inconsistent with their faith or values.”

But by the 1980s, much chimp behavior was being interpreted in ways that would have been labeled anthropomorphism — ascribing human traits to non-human entities — decades earlier.

Of course, facts are important, but they don’t necessarily reveal anything; it is the biographer’s folly to ascribe deeper meaning to them, to extrapolate truth from a disparate series of events.