Word: aback
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...former assistant dean of Harvard College (1930-39), I am interested to learn that some 300 students ejected 8 deans from University Hall yesterday, in protest against the University's efforts to keep the ROTC. This doesn't take me aback--but it does take me back, half a century back...
Somewhat taken aback by the attention given the cronyism issue on the first day, Fortas came prepared for the second with an annotated list of 14 previous Justices who had advised Presidents. The first Chief Justice, John Jay (1789-1795) counseled George Washington.* The fifth, Roger Taney, helped Andrew Jackson. Associate Justice David Davis, Lincoln's close friend and executor, advised the Civil War President, while Louis Brandeis was called in by Woodrow Wilson during several World War I crises. Chief Justice Wil liam Howard Taft, in Fortas' words, "performed extensive advisory services for Presidents Harding, Coolidge...
Plainly taken aback by his decision to come, the Czechoslovaks at first announced that Kosygin, as though he were any idle jet-setter, had merely slipped into town for a "short holiday" and a dip in the healing waters of the local spas. They had to admit soon enough that Kosygin really had come for "a continuation of an exchange of views" on Czechoslovak matters. At the first exchange with Dubcek, President Ludvik Svoboda and other officials, Kosygin reported that their reforms were "meeting with understanding" in Moscow-presumably a reassurance...
Although many Western European governments, most notably the French, have been saying that Washington must take stern action against the balance of payments deficit, they could only be taken aback at the extent of what Paris' Les Echos called Johnson's "anti-Marshall Plan." The cut off of dollars will curtail industrial expansion on the Continent by forcing interest rates up (Eurodollar bond-yield rates climbed 1%, to 7.2%, last week). Declining tourism and tougher competition from U.S. exporters are considered likely to depress business revenues. Italy expects the U.S. controls to tip its precarious balance of payments...
...erotic to the apotheosis of the ordinary, the art fancier understandably asks: "What is art?" Replies Samuel Adams Green, who supervised the installation of New York's outdoor sculpture show: "Everything is art if it is chosen by the artist to be art." But even Green was taken aback when Sculptor Claes Oldenburg, known for his spoofing soft-plastic sculptures, last week ordered a hole dug in Central Park by professional gravediggers, and then had it filled in to produce "an invisible, underground sculpture...