affront

For a trader to refuse one of these free and flourishing blades a credit, whatever unpaid scores might stare him in the face, would be a flagrant affront scarcely to be forgiven.

When, however, the Columbiad was entirely finished, this state of closed doors could no longer be maintained; besides it would have been bad taste, and even imprudence, to affront the public feeling.

Lady Russell was extremely sorry that such a measure should have been resorted to at all, wondered, grieved, and feared; and the affront it contained to Anne, in Mrs Clay's being of so much use, while Anne could be of none, was a very sore aggravation.

While many people react to such affronts with cynicism, others remain hopelessly gullible.

This didn't help to ameliorate the affronts to taste he staged in his painting.

Not only is the line grammatically and metaphorically dubious, but it, too, seems cribbed from a Monty Python sketch in which Brit wits like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw gather and insult the Throne, then blame their blasphemies on one another and scramble to reinvent the affronts into poetic compliments (one line, in fact, concerned a stream of bat's urine - ``a shaft of gold when all around is dark'').

Critics charge that these gas-guzzling moving violations of good taste and self-restraint are nothing better than environment-stomping, high-beam blinding, road-hogging affronts to civil harmony.

Help team members resist the urge to perceive opposing views as personal affronts.