(adv.) Backward against the mast; -- said of the sails when pressed by the wind.
(n.) An abacus.
Example Sentences:
(1) Sources said that when Mitchell toured the Commons tea rooms on Wednesday and Thursday, he was taken aback by the opposition to him staying put, despite Cameron's support.
(2) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Our political leaders can’t bear to face the truth’: Camila Batmanghelidjh spoke to the Guardian’s Patrick Butler in July “So you can understand that I am taken aback by allegations which now present themselves, about which I knew nothing.” Kids Company, set up by the charismatic Batmanghelidjh in 1996, was known to have the firm support of David Cameron for its work on gang violence and disadvantaged children.
(3) "At first I was taken aback by how quickly this thing blew up."
(4) Everyone was taken aback by Harrison's generosity, not least Idle.
(5) In the summer of 2015, Corbyn himself was taken aback by the surge in support for his message.
(6) Gaskill, who had found the play abandoned on a shelf at the Royal Court and decided to stage it the moment he read it, was equally taken aback.
(7) The ferocity of the battle, once the results of the prime minister’s negotiations with his EU partners had been announced, has taken Downing Street aback.
(8) A father of four children in the Palisades, a wealthy neighborhood in west Los Angeles, was taken aback when he accompanied his 12-year-old son on a camping trip with scouts.
(9) Still, I'm taken aback by the immediate and vocal lack of enthusiasm for Steve Jobs's new product.
(10) Mallett said he had rebuffed the offer, which had come four years too late as far as he was concerned, but when it was put to Lancaster before England’s dead rubber against Uruguay he was immediately taken aback.
(11) For a few days, we were all really taken aback.” On Thursday, Dixons reported that its Greek arm, Kotsovolos , was seeing big-ticket items fly off the shelves.
(12) Labour seized on the ministerial disarray over the policy.Yvette Cooper, the shadow work and pensions secretary, said: "The government's unfair attack on child benefit is now unravelling ... they have clearly been taken aback by the reaction of parents across the country."
(13) Although the player has developed a thick skin, not least while he agitated for a move away from Anfield, he has been taken aback by the level of criticism that has been flung his way – particularly online – over Euro 2016 and apparently feels he has been made a scapegoat for England’s shortcomings at the tournament.
(14) For his part, Chu admits he was taken aback by his entry to Washington life.
(15) On Monday night, Lib Dem MPs were taken aback by the strength of opposition to a deal with Labour from within the Labour parliamentary party.
(16) They also told me hospitals around Aleppo and Idlib have had Red Cross symbols removed because they are becoming a target for the Russians.” Taken aback by what he was told by the group of rescue workers, trainees known as the white helmets, he continued: “We in Britain have been rightly challenged about Saudi Arabia in Yemen and why we maintain our confidence in the Saudis not breaching international law.
(17) "I think they were taken aback by how quickly the region – in which they have invested a lot of time and energy and diplomacy, and a lot of human and monetary resources – turned against them," said Jakobson.
(18) The other half would not have been remotely taken aback.
(19) Welfare groups told the Senate community affairs committee they were taken aback by how “harsh” the budget was and believed it would be more balanced.
(20) He was taken aback to have his application for benefits turned down.
Startled
Definition:
(imp. & p. p.) of Startle
Example Sentences:
(1) These later results suggest that dopamine agonists increase sensorimotor reactivity measured with acoustic startle by acting on sensory rather than motor parts of the reflex arc.
(2) The hypothesis that the standard acoustic startle habituation paradigm contains the elements of Pavlovian fear conditioning was tested.
(3) But that promise was beginning to startle the markets, which admire Monti’s appetite for austerity and fear the free spending and anti-European views of some Italian politicians.
(4) Both startle amplitude and onset latency showed significantly greater facilitation in the preschool children than in the 8-year-olds and adults.
(5) flexion, stretch, rolling, startle, jumping (stepping), and writhing.
(6) Three response patterns were scored: (1) no startle, (2) startle without response decrement, and (3) response decrement by 12 stimuli.
(7) More importantly, motor and cardiovascular responses to startle may be separated through discrimination of afferent stimuli suggesting either differences in neural pathways for acoustic and tactile stimuli or a differential dependency of the various responses on stimulus characteristics.
(8) The startle-elicited increase in blood pressure was significantly elevated in SHRs and at the same time the acoustic startle response was depressed as compared to WKY rats.
(9) A placebo effect could not definitely be ruled out, but the startling changes seen in patients who had been followed for years with other forms of therapy suggest strongly that this improvement was genuine.
(10) In general, conditions that affect the amplitude of the acoustic startle reflex similarly influence the disruptive effect of a noise burst on motor performance, but the two measures are not correlated in the detail necessary to suggest a causative relationship.
(11) The results are compared to other drugs known to affect the startle reflex.
(12) In awake rats the latency of auditory startle recorded electromyographically in the neck is about 5 ms, suggesting that the primary component of this brainstem reflex is mediated by a neural circuit with only a few synapses.
(13) A series of seven experiments related amplitude and latency of the pigeon's startle response, elicited by an intense visual stimulus, to antecedent auditory and visual events in the sensory environment.
(14) The acoustic startle response (ASR) of male rats was measured during several sessions over a 24-hr period in both a light-dark cycle and a constant-dark condition.
(15) That dramatically shifts the focus back to us, the programme makers, to come up with more, new, startling ideas, absolutely unmissable storylines and settings, the sharpest writing.
(16) Because ammocoetes are burrowing filter feeders, this startle behavior results in rapid withdrawal of the head into the burrow.
(17) Startle was indexed by the eyeblink, which was measured by vertical electro-oculography.
(18) In the present work no significant differences were found between the behaviour of FG7142-kindled rats and vehicle-treated controls in social interaction test, elevated plus maze, or the Vogel conflict test of anxiety or in tests of home cage aggression or startle responses.
(19) The first attempted to determine a sonic boom level below which startle would not occurr.
(20) It is able to (1) sample startle responses from 5 animals simultaneously during a specific time band after the eliciting stimulus; (2) convert the analogue startle amplitudes into 2-digit numbers; (3) print the digital results of each startle in each animal; (4) add up the startle amplitudes for each rat over a preset number of stimuli and print the totals; (5) print the interstimulus interval and (6) code for up to six diferent types of trials.