Word: opprobrium
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...abandon the agency's traditional role as a nonpartisan arbiter of intelligence. That fostered a climate in which officials were discouraged from sending Bush inconvenient information--such as doubts about the quality of intelligence on Iraq's program for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Tenet is no stranger to opprobrium (his reputation will never recover from his telling Bush that the evidence on WMD was a "slam dunk"), but the verdict of his subordinates in State of War is particularly withering. "George Tenet liked to talk about how he was a tough Greek from Queens," a former Tenet aide tells...
Throughout musical history, a single compositional style has generally dominated its era. In the fractious late 20th century, however, composers freely draw on myriad influences to create highly personalized idioms. Eclecticism, once a term of opprobrium, has become a virtue, perhaps even a style in itself, as the boundaries of serious music steadily expand...
There was thus little reason for the critics of apartheid, South Africa's system of racial separation, to moderate their tones as they continued last week to shower opprobrium on the Botha regime. At the United Nations' 40th anniversary celebration, high officials from at least a dozen nations stood to denounce the Pretoria government and demand measures against it. "If you don't apply sanctions," President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia warned the leaders of developed nations with investments in South Africa, "hundreds of thousands of people will die and the investments will go up in flames...
...nostalgia, an era that started with Pearl Harbor and ended with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, when strategic thinking in the priestly realms of foreign and economic policy was unpolluted by short-term partisan politics, when words like intellectual and realism and, yes, global weren't terms of opprobrium. This Administration has presided over the culmination of a trend that has been a long time building: the triumph of politics and populist anti-intellectualism over policy...
...Good luck, coach. We live in a time and a culture in which vulgarity is so ubiquitous that the word has ceased to carry any hint of opprobrium, and where the concept of civility seems as dated as Ciceronian oratory. Cultural historian Jacques Barzun wrote recently that a 300-year-old "code of civilized manners" came to an end "about halfway into the 20th century." I'd argue that Barzun's dating is off by a couple of decades-otherwise my yellowed copy of a 1967 Playboy would be a lot smuttier than it is-but it's hard...