Word: scornful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...rehearsal, he is one plain musician talking to others. He may interrupt the music to say, "Take some of that color out of the A flat," or "Make this more crescendo." But he never indulges in exhibitionism or talkfests, which often earn other conductors only the scorn of their players. At a concert, he makes few flourishes in the direction of the audience. "I have no patience," he says, "with those conductors who, though their backs are physically turned to the spectators, spiritually face the ticketholders in an expressionist dance which has nothing to do with how the music ultimately...
Among urban cognoscenti, Los Angeles has long been an object of scorn. Many critics for years ridiculed the sprawling metropolis as a gaggle of suburbs "in search of a city." They had a point. The core of the city not only failed to share in Southern California's explosive postwar growth but developed ominous symptoms of decay. Though downtown Los Angeles remained a stronghold for banking, finance, oil and insurance, jobs in other fields followed people to the suburbs. Vacancy rates soared in dingy old office buildings. Sleazy stores and bad restaurants proliferated. Forsaken by many retailers, streets that...
...they feel particularly threatened these days by the forces of a changing world that they certainly never made, do not fully understand, and want no part of. Composed almost entirely of lower middle-class factory workers of Italian, Portuguese and Polish extraction, they view intellectuals with suspicion, students with scorn, and money with fear...
...many respects policemen represent the most typical beliefs and attitudes of their communities, including what Los Angeles Chief Thomas Reddin deplores as a moralistic tendency to see things in terms of either-or. Not surprisingly, police tend to be appalled by abnormal behavior and rebellions against authority. Most scorn long hair, and homosexuality horrifies them. With their ingrained respect for work, they take a dim view of people living on welfare. Perhaps most irritating to cops are the white antiwar protesters, most of them collegians who have rejected advantages that policemen themselves lacked and toil to give their own children...
Superstition is a natural human reaction to over whelming dangers or baffling situations. The word stems from the Latin superstitio, meaning "a standing still over," and connotes amazement or dread of supernatural forces beyond one's control. Rationalists scorn superstition as a hangover of primitive man's obsolete interpretations of the world. Indeed, nothing seems sillier nowadays than rituals like knocking on wood or chanting "God bless you!" (to prevent the sneezer's soul from flying away). Even so, modern behavioral scientists respect superstition as an enduring expression of the human need to master the inexplicable...