Word: contempts
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...trying to keep track of them. Last year Los Angeles police had to abandon a purse-snatching stakeout across from the park 20 minutes after setting it up. They caught so many offenders that they ran out of arresting officers. Even those who are apprehended show surprising fearlessness and contempt for the law. "For guys used to standing in a four-by-four cell all day, our prisons are like country clubs," observes Detective Alvarez. Many in the police force feel overwhelmed. The situation, says Plainclothes Patrolman Manny Mata, a seven-year veteran of the district, "is completely...
...Parisians themselves helped to twist my fruitless venture into a routine exercise in humiliation by placing me at the mercy of either their effusive kindness or blackhearted contempt. One garrulous shopkeeper held me captive with a rapid-fire series of cheerful comments and questions, most of which flew past my comprehension. A neighboring grocer whacked my hand and swept me out of the store when I squeezed a tomato. The fact that I was unable to find simple and moderate good-naturedness among the Parisians left me Jangled and teary-eyed at the end of each...
...knowledge etches a fresh wrinkle onto one's brain. With horror, I visualized my cerebrum as smooth as a baby's bottom. I had obviously been fooling myself, to believe that I could escape from thinking without effacing my self-respect in the process. Once my fit of self-contempt subsided, I took steps to register as a sophomore...
...thousands of wife beaters who happen to be in prison (almost all are there for some other, less peculiar crime) regard rapists with contempt, and rapists in turn call the cellblocks' child abusers scum. But in fact the three groups have some rough affinities. The privately violent are often alcoholic or drug-dependent. All three species tend to have low opinions of themselves; they get violent, psychoanalysts say, because it gives them a cheap squirt of power. Like most criminals, they are immature and impulsive. Everything they want they want instantly. And they are uncommonly isolated people, often virtually friendless...
...Brill puts it, "The waters of Shiloh springing from the head of Western Civilization." But the experiment flops. Hopelessly inept as a pedagogue and judge of children, Brill blames his school's failure on its students, whom he dismisses as "commoners, weeds, the children of plumbers." Given such contempt, he fails to recognize genius when it comes his way. Beulah Lilt, who sits immobile | and mute in the classroom, is destined to become a great artist. Poor Beulah! i A quiet, tiny child, self-immured, she seems to suffer from "an unremitting bewilderment," much like the young Cynthia Ozick...