Word: backgrounder
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Boyle says, "Slumdog is just a hybrid of the words underdog and slum. Some people found it insulting, when actually it's a triumph for a kid from that background and a vindication of his resilience...
...writer’s humble background became a factor later, when the Signet Society—Harvard’s social club of arts and letters—almost did not accept Updike into their cloistered circle. Then-Crimson President Michael Maccoby ’54 nominated Updike for inclusion in the Signet, but Updike was not able to pay the membership...
...lines had been erased, blinding them to the harsh realities of the post-Civil War African-American experience. Now, as the first president with black heritage ascends to the White House, Americans are again quick to congratulate themselves for triumphing over prejudice. But, though Obama’s mixed background and encouragement of diversity are an essential first step in breaching racial divides, we should not be naïve enough to believe that racism no longer poses a problem in America...
...Schapiro's financial self-regulation background may not be enough. According to Dr. Fred Dunbar, senior vice president at NERA, an economic consulting firm, "banks are suppose to behave themselves under self-rule." During the Bush Administration this popular belief drifted over to the SEC, Dunbar says. "The feeling was, with the SEC, that with such self-enforcement they wouldn't have to step up their own enforcement. But the financial crisis has led to a re-examination of this theory, firms don't behave as one might think in theory...
...background: there are 12 Chinese zodiac animals, each of which is subdivided by five elements signaling different qualities - wood, earth, water, fire and metal. This year's ox is an earth ox. That may sound innocuous enough, but according to one astrological interpretation, financial markets are in dire need of a spark from the fire element to set stocks blazing. For other fortune tellers, the worry is absence of metal, an element with which they make a simple astrological connection to money. A metal year, they say, brings plenty of gold. An earth year buries all that lucre under piles...