Word: disdain
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Reith extended his Swiftian disdain for humanity to himself. The saddest and most redeeming entry in his ill-tempered chronicles is Reith's admission: "I have always known that I had a horrid character and disposition. And now I am querulous and embittered and small and shrunken and can't see even near the horizon. Believing nothing and without faith or hope, [I am] stifled and strangling and submerged by the pettiness of my own preoccupations...
...woman waiting in a seat, a platinum blond with hair teased into a mountainous bundle and skin with wrinkles still dimly perceptible under heavy makeup turns her head to the side and looks up, apparently proud of her looks. The face itself is unattractive, but the pride, and the disdain with which the woman treats the camera seem to open up an entirely different dimension--that one moment of revealed character make the picture or sequence of pictures interesting in themselves, removed even from the welfare office...
...When he says lower-class he really means blacks," Blustein says of Banfield's definitions. "What he says in essence is that we have racist institutions, and that their racist practices should continue." But Blustein's position is oversimplified: Banfield's disdain does not end with lower class blacks--it pervades to all members of the lower class...
Parkhurst also treats advertisers with truculent disdain. For example, he refuses to accept Ford Motor Co. ads because "they made a crummy truck," and both a Union Oil Co. division and White Motor Corp. have in the past pulled out their advertising after he rapped them. He also has to pay for lawyers to protect himself against an average of some $25 million in pending libel suits (he has won seven and never lost), and to maintain an electric gate at his shabby Hollywood offices to guard against midnight raiders and subpoena servers. Says one staffer: "He could be taking...
...disdain for mere mechanics carries over into his expectations for groups that work under him, including amateur groups like the Summer School Chorus, which he is conducting this year. Most choral conductors spend a lot of time going over the music slowly until each section has learned its notes. Only then do they begin to work on musical values. But Chen takes the music up to tempo from the very first. "If I let everyone carefully study their notes, when I want to go fast, they won't be able to go fast any more." He fears that his singers...