"ascribe to" = "subscribe to"

[Jonathan Lighter]

This has got to be a wave of the future, with over 30,000 raw Googlits for "ascribe/s to the idea/ belief."  Usenet has it back to the mid-90s.

  Here's one at Ph.D. level.  The writer, who shall be nameless here, is Assistant Professor of English at Marshall College:

  a2001, in Philip K. Jason & Mark A. Graves, eds. _Encyclopedia of American War Literature_ (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001) 153:  Heinemann's narrators are war-savvy combatants who ascribe to the Puritan beliefs of fate and destiny.

  ("Beliefs of fate and destiny" is good too, but not as good.)

  JL



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