Word: affront
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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WATCH THE FRONT LINE. In a sales or service business, that's the best way to enhance the bottom line. Consider the typical cell-phone company, which each year loses nearly 40% of its customers, a figure that U.S. Cellular president John Rooney calls "a personal affront." He says he's less interested in luring new customers with rock-bottom, gimmicky calling plans than in making sure existing customers are happy with the plans they have selected. U.S. Cellular requires new sales and customer-service reps to undergo six weeks of training that emphasizes behavior rather than gadgetry. "We tell...
...ruthlessness, and he has no intention of ceding authority to the 37-year-old Atta, a rising military star. Atta has curried support like a small-town mayoral candidate, printing up posters of himself to plaster around the city, and Dostum is likely to take that as an affront. "There's a war within a war here," says Dostum aide Sayed Kamil. The area's Persian-speaking Hazara aren't happy about taking orders from either the Uzbek Dostum or the Tajik Atta. "We're not going to accept anybody as big brother," says Abdul Wahid, an aide to Mohaqiq...
...listen to the dispossessed. The great successes of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s have prompted even conservatives to acknowledge that these social protests have helped to move the nation closer to its founding promises of freedom and equality. These movements were not an affront to democracy; they were an embodiment of it. On the local level, last spring’s sit-in played an equally important role in bringing more voices into our community’s decision making process at Harvard. We must remember that the HCECP itself is a result...
...expression. If it is your misfortune to belong to this marginalized minority, you can forget about a military career unless you hide your true identity in the shadow of the closet. Can we watch unmoved as our compatriots suffer the bitter bite of bias? Can we permit this brazen affront to the Most Holy Ideal of Equality? Nay. We cannot. We must not. Let the military be banned from Harvard forever...
...prove. Products of Hong Kong's labyrinthine government housing estates, the potty-mouthed hip-hop collective is an affront to the scrubbed-clean Canto-pop starmakers who package and micromanage saccharin-sweet crooners as carefully as Madison Avenue launches a new line of soap. Warning labels decree their albums may not be distributed, circulated, sold, rented, given, lent, shown, played or projected to anyone under the age of 18. Even LMF's schoolyard acronym grates on Hong Kong's frantic, money-obsessed culture: lazy muthaf...