Word: discomfortable
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...resistance to easy affection and warmth among family members. Writes Anthropologist Seymour Parker of the University of Utah cautiously: "It is questionable if the costs (of the incest taboo) in guilt and uneasy distancing between intimates are necessary or desirable. What are the benefits of linking a mist of discomfort to the spontaneous warmth of the affectionate kiss and touch between family members...
Most gay people used to share these beliefs, and consequently understand others' fears: the fear of child molestation, sadomasochism, and hellfire; the fear of being considered "deviant" by others, and the anxiety provoked by wondering about oneself; the fear of "what they do in bed"; that pervasive discomfort on the part of most "straight" people that comes from the knowledge that, despite a desire to be open-minded, they still feel awkward around gay people...
...will be identified by Okun's universally used definition: two consecutive quarters of negative G.N.P. growth. In the early 1960s he devised Okun's Law: for every 3% jump in economic growth, unemployment declines 1%; until the 1970s stagflation, the rule worked perfectly. Okun also invented the "discomfort index," the sum of the rates of unemployment and inflation. Okun's abiding concern was to control inflation without triggering recession and its grim results for the poor. Economic efficiency, he believed, must yield somewhat to social equality, or as he put it: "Society can transport money from rich...
Perhaps Americans are suffering merely the discomfort of joining the human race. Perhaps they will be better for it. In August 1943, after a Japanese destroyer rammed his PT109, John Kennedy wrote to his parents: "For an American, it's got to be awfully easy or awfully tough. When it's in the middle, then there's trouble." Americans have been rattling around fecklessly in the middle, but now are rolling toward the awfully tough...
Majority group members at Harvard often complain that they feel awkward among groups of "others." How do they think these "others" feel around them? Yes, racial tension does make people feel uncomfortable. And as long as majority group members continue to allow the burden of this discomfort to fall upon the oppressed, they are perpetuating an attidinal inequity which betrays their own unconscious racism...