Word: aback
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...professing their oneness with all things ambulatory and the more shapely inanimate objects. Two female acquaintances of mine, while under its spell, came up to me with sparks in their eyes and told me, "I love you." This happens to me a lot, but most people would be taken aback, and would suspect such tenders. However, XTC is a relatively benign drug, and a few hours suffice to fade its apostles back down to our usual condition, where we don't speak of love so easily...
Chinese officials often seem taken aback by the sheer novelty of their recent economic achievements. "Tell me," an experienced Chinese diplomat asked in Peking not long ago, "do you really think China is going capitalist?" It is not, of course. The key means of production remain in the ! hands of the state, and the Communist Party is firmly in charge. The question that should be asked is this: Is China growing out of its half-century-long embrace of Marxist metaphysics? The answer is a qualified...
...them to the President. Partly this is a matter of mastering new information. Regan found that the Ortega they talked about at the White House was Nicaragua's leftist leader and not Katherine Ortega, Treasurer of the U.S., who signs the money. On TV he was taken aback when asked what the Administration planned to do about AIDS, not the balance of trade...
Then currency traders were taken aback by bulletins concerning the testimony of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker before a congressional committee. Volcker said that Western central banks had not acted "forcefully enough" to halt the dollar's ascent. Some traders took that to be a call for stepped-up Government intervention...
...greater proportion of the Soviet than of the U.S. nuclear-strike forces. Alexander Haig, who was Secretary of State at the time, has written that the U.S. proposals "would require such drastic reductions in the Soviet inventory as to suggest that they were unnegotiable." If Reagan really was taken aback by the Soviet response, that would raise questions about his understanding of basic nuclear facts...