Word: contemptable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Pickens has contempt for what he calls the entrenched managers who run Big Oil. He views them as high-salaried hired hands who care more about maintaining their jobs than improving stock value for their shareholders. Says he: "Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa." Pickens calculates that, as a group, officers of the energy giants own just three-tenths of 1% of their firms' shares. (Pickens owns 2.2% of Mesa.) Since they have relatively small investments in their corporations, he argues...
Commentators like James J. Kilpatrick toss out the phrase to register contempt for a federal complex preoccupied with its own navel. William Safire says the phrase connotes something "of interest to tea-leaf readers of Washington goings-on but (is) strictly a yawner to the World Out There." Author Ben Wattenberg defines "inside the Beltway" as the "exponential expansion of what used to be the Georgetown cocktail party--elitism that has lost touch...
There was no indication that the South Koreans would apologize to the U.S. delegation, which, South Korean officials explained, had come to Seoul in a private capacity. "Do these Americans consider South Korea a colony?" asked one senior member of Chun's government. "This shows contempt...
Hewlett-Packard. Though it failed to recognize the potential of Wozniak's proposal for a personal computer, Hewlett-Packard is highly regarded in Silicon Valley for fostering innovation. In 1982 Engineer Charles House was given a medal for "extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty." He had ignored an order from Founder David Packard to stop working on a type of high-quality video monitor. Despite the rebuke, House pressed ahead and succeeded in developing the monitor, which has been used to track NASA's manned moon landings and also in heart transplants. Although there were...
Undoubtedly the contempt-breeding familiarity of TV is partially responsible. But, beyond that, you do sense that something has been lost...