Word: aback
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...were taken aback at how much interest there was," Rubalcava said...
...first expedition on the space station requests permission to take the radio call sign Alpha," he said. Both he and Krikalev had expressed favor for the name before launch, since the first letter of the Greek alphabet was neither Russian nor American. Goldin was taken aback, and somewhere off microphone huddled with others before coming back...
...comic interlude Saturday night, Dunn was interrupted by the strains of a colonial fife and drum group, headed by a costumed George Washington, that marched up on to the stage. Taken aback, Dunn asked, "Are you sure you should be at the Radcliffe party? You have the wrong campaign, George...
Alas, childhood's innocence was bound to end sometime, and, as a mature visitor to the Fogg's exhibit Philip Guston: A New Alphabet (and new devotee of museum wall-text and peripheral literature), I was taken aback to discover that Guston's coneheads are, in fact, Ku Klux Klan members, that the cycloptic heads (not shown in this exhibition) are representations of a bedridden Guston himself, that the fairy-tale sphinx of "Nile" (1977) is an ailing wife. Symbolic, after all. But, as Guston reminisces in the excellent film documentary of his career, A Life Lived (1980), on view...
...Harvard audience cheered, and a couple people--to much laughter--yelled out the suggestion that Nader jump onstage. The candidate was taken aback, but quickly regained his composure...