Word: contemptable
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...restorative. It is restoration that China now needs more than anything. After three decades of coercive utopian experimentation, a return to ethics, for three millenniums the unifying theme of Chinese culture, may help. Optimists will be warmed by an event planned for next May: the formation, after years of contempt for the past, of the Peking Academy for the Study of Confucianism and the Chinese Classics...
...from that perspective. Reagan has lamented the unofficial American nickname of S.D.I., insisting that its aims are entirely peaceful, while Soviet spokesmen relish using the literal Russian translation of Star Wars, partly because the phrase includes the word war. Since his meeting with Shultz, Gromyko has continued to heap contempt on the defensive rationale for Star Wars. Mixing his metaphors a bit, he has said that if the U.S. persists with the program, the world will end up "under a Sword of Damocles" and "on a tightrope over the abyss...
Abraham Lincoln compared its power to the surging Mississippi River. Jane Austen found it so indispensable that she ironed it out when it was damp. Thackeray endured its "rather shabby pay," Coleridge tried in vain to join its staff, and Dickens endured its critical contempt. It accompanied the Light Brigade to the Valley of Death in the Crimea, and climbed with Edmund Hillary up Mount Everest. Although it proudly displays the royal coat of arms on its masthead, in an 1830 obituary it described the standard of conduct of King George IV as "little higher than that of animal indulgence...
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...