By LAWRENCE FELLOWS

You can adopt a position, an amendment or a child, which means you choose it, embrace it or espouse it, or take it as your own.

You can adapt yourself or something else to a particular situation by adjusting to it.

An adept person is skilled or proficient, the sort who can adopt almost any position and, if necessary, adapt it to his needs.

Often, these things take work, as the poet Robert Frost suggested:

“It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling

 To get adapted to my kind of fooling.”