Word: aback
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...question with fluency and intelligence. I was amused by this and did an imitation of it to divert my colleagues after dinner. Among them was a distinguished Oxford philosopher. As soon as he saw my imitation, he immediately said, "That's Wittgenstein! Is her surname _____ by any chance?" Taken aback, I said that it was. "I thought so," said my colleague. "Both her parents are professional philosophers and devoted followers of Wittgenstein." The gesture had passed from the great philosopher, via one or both of her parents, to my pupil...
...hung like a cashew. The Crimson immediately pulled strings and waxed plaintive to get a one-on-one with the celebrated word-wrestler who delivered such literary punches as The Black Dahlia, American Tabloid and L.A. Confidential. Armed for the interview with nonsense and irreverence, The Crimson was taken aback to find a straight and staid character with answers to defeat over populated extremist myth in which we would like to outfit...
...Molloy of AAHLRSA was initially taken aback by both my journalistic antagonism and my ease with unwieldy acronyms. She got especially nervous when I asked if AAHLRSA keeps the cool stuff it finds on the side of the adoptee's highway. But then she interrupted me with a pitch: "I'm telling you, I have a location in L.A. that is phenomenal: where the 405 meets the 5 at Burbank airport. To me, that's a location...
...tell people what their mailbox number isand where they're from," Proctor says. "Sometimespeople are a bit taken aback...but you really geta sense of what people's names...
...remained under wraps. In Russia, Clinton also volunteered that he was "heartened" by the understanding he'd found in "leaders around the world," a fresh take on the "In France this would be no big deal" defense. You would think Clinton was a recent emigre from Paris, completely taken aback by the customs of the native press...