Word: aback
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...likely to have at his homes in New York and Oxfordshire, England. That amounts to a lifestyle that few would ever plan for, and Stringer certainly didn't. He told TIME last week that when Idei first called him with the suggestion of the new job, he was taken aback. "I had not considered that a likely alternative," Stringer said. No shame in that. Nor had anyone else...
When my mom called to say she had something for me, the thought of baked goods popped into mind. Later on, when she dropped off not a brownie but a book, I was taken aback. She expects me to read a non-school book in the middle of the semester...
Summers, visibly taken aback by the comment, paused for a moment before extending his hand out to the audience...
...when one friend suddenly left her university halfway through the year to enroll at a local college, I was taken aback. Never before had it occurred to me that there might be more to the story than what I was seeing. I would later learn that in spite of the upbeat entries posted in her online journal, there had been problems—that in spite of the smiling faces and spontaneity carefully captured in her photographs, she had been secretly unhappy...
When President Bush meets German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Mainz this week, it may not be a love fest. Washington was taken aback this month when a Schröder speech stated that NATO "is no longer the primary venue" for discussing transatlantic issues. TIME Berlin bureau chief Charles P. Wallace talked to Schröder about the uneasy alliance Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was just in Berlin, and there were many smiles. Relations between the U.S. and Germany seem to have improved. But there's still Iraq. Has anything really changed? You must not underestimate...