Word: scornful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Establishment scorn heaped on Reagan's proposal for antiballistic missile defense could easily a mountain range. A year after Reagan proposed the Star Wars concept, the New York Times derided the system in any form as patently useless: "Since even minor holes in any defense would risk millions of deaths, no system is worth having unless it works almost perfectly. And since it could never be fully tested, perfection is unattainable...
...most ferocious scorn is reserved not for novelists but for scholars. A brilliant set-piece chapter called "Emma Bovary's Eyes" takes on the late Enid Starkie, Oxford don and Flaubert biographer, who disparaged the novelist for coloring his heroine's eyes in three different hues. When the relevant passages are cited, there is no real contradiction; what Flaubert was describing was the effect of emotions on the face. Scholarly critics, fumes Braithwaite, regard the most sublime creative geniuses as "some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair who . . . was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything...
...workhouses and came to understand prostitutes as victims both of their socio-economic circumstances and of a moral code which made them criminals but placed no blame on the men they consorted with. The acts were eventually repeated, but not before Butler had endured a good deal of public scorn...
...years as U.S. Ambassador to France, Evan G. Galbraith has achieved something of a reputation for making undiplomatic remarks about his hosts. Last week the former banker and Reaganite turned his scorn on the State Department. After announcing that he would resign in July, Galbraith told the New York Times that career diplomats are overly timid "liberals." Said he: "There's something about the foreign service that takes the guts out of people. The tendency is to avoid confronting an issue." Galbraith's broadside incensed Secretary of State George Shultz, who declared, "Somebody ought to tie his tongue...
Before a stunned Senate committee last week, Budget Director David Stockman, his voice full of scorn, derided the excesses of the military retirement system. "It's a scandal; it's an outrage," he said, adding that "institutional forces in the military are more concerned about protecting their retirement benefits than they are about protecting the security of the American people." Declared Stockman: "When push comes to shove, they'll give up on security before they'll give up on retirement...