Word: scornful
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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...
...appeals primarily to what he calls the "rednecks, pea pickers, peckerwoods and crackers," mostly people of modest means, he has had no trouble raking in substantial sums for campaign expenditures. And though he is almost universally derided in print and on TV, he only grows stronger, turning the scorn of the "pseudo intellectuals" to his own advantage among those who have always distrusted the press...
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...