Word: affront
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...Civil Rights Division are cracking down on what they believe is the widespread use of threats and violence to force migrants and other transients to work. Prosecutors have dusted off a set of slavery and peonage laws originally dating from the 19th century to fight this modern-day affront to the 13th Amendment, which forbids slavery. Next week the House Labor Standards subcommittee will convene hearings to evaluate the performance of federal agencies in enforcing current laws. In announcing the hearings, the subcommittee chairman, California Democrat George Miller, said, "The Constitution made slavery illegal over 100 years...
...Bach on the harpsichord that offended, or his way with celestial navigation, or the servants, or the phone calls from Ronald Reagan. No: his worst affront seemed to be the custom chopped-and-stretched chauffeur-driven Cadillac with the partition and the special back-seat temperature control. It was not even the fact that William F. Buckley Jr. rides around in such a car, like a Mafia don in his land yacht, that gave some reviewers eczema. It was the way that he wrote about it, with such a blithe air of entitlement. No right-wing intellectual...
...detectors are an affront to human dignity...
Taboos are made to be broken; one sees today why Pearlstein was interested in an artist so totally unlike himself, the Dadaist Francis Picabia, who conceived his work as a constant affront to received taste. Painting the studio nude, Pearlstein declared allegiances very different from those common in the New York art world of the late '50s. In neither hedonism nor irony nor self-expression, he wanted to go back and start from Gustave Courbet, painting the naked body in a spirit of detached, colloquial reportage, as though all the proscriptions against figure painting had lost their magic...
...wittiest, if not the surest, books are the Gault/Millau guides (Crown; $11.95 each) to Paris, London, New York and France. The work of two dedicated French cuisinartistes, to whom a badly cooked meal is a personal, nay national, affront, Henri Gault and Christian Millau's assessments of hotels and restaurants are unfortunately often more informed with high passion than sound taste. More reliable is the august Guide Michelin, long the three-starred supreme arbiter of hotels, restaurants and touring, not so much written as compiled as if by God himself...