Word: contemptable
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More puzzling and complicated than language is the American social syntax. The first impression is one of dazzling and rather unsettling informality, an indiscriminate camaraderie. But one learns that going to the opera in shirt- sleeves (an outrage, surely!) does not mean contempt for culture or even necessarily a lack of rules. Calling the boss by his first name, which takes some effort, does not mean that he and the office boy are equals. Indeed, equality is both the great illusion and the great reality of America. The immigrant is slow to understand that below the egalitarian surface there...
...potato of terrorism is now in Reagan's hands, and it is smoldering. Already he has been burned a bit. At his press conference last week, he had to endure that humbling American ritual of reminder. His 1980 campaign contempt for Carter's failure to win an early release of the U.S. hostages held in Iran ("They shouldn't have been there six days, let alone six months") was thrown back at him as the world watched. He was chastened. But one of Reagan's strengths is that at such moments, he has an extraordinary control of his temper. Common...
...usual evolution of major artists in old age, whereby they become cozily grand paternal figures, patting their juniors on the back and reminiscing in autumnal mellowness about their dead coevals, has not happened to Bacon, who is apt to dismiss nearly everything painted in the 20th century with bleak contempt. He has gone on record as admiring Giacometti and Picasso; for a few others, a few words of respect; beyond that, the sense of isolation is ferocious. The motto of an aristocratic French family declared: "Roi ne puis, prince ne daigne, Rohan je suis" (King I cannot be; prince...
...roll of toilet paper manufactured in a Rumanian factory and smuggled out of the country revealed the Hungarian words for God, Jeremiah and other biblical names. Instead of distributing the holy books, said Calvinist Minister Alexander Havadtoy, Rumania's Communist rulers recycled them into pulp "to show their contempt...
Moreover, the University has shown contempt for its own traditions of free speech and movement by failing to take proper measures to enforce these rights. Instead it has, in an act of institutional weakness, resurrected an almost universally-hated tribunal which makes a mockery of the very rights the University has pledged to uphold. It has put students' fates in the hands of a body with no responsibility, no due process, and no legitimacy...