Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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What could the U.S. do? Washington was publicly silent. Senator Styles Bridges, chairman of the congressional "watchdog" committee on foreign aid, demanded a special session of Congress. But that idea was promptly labelled absurd. The fate of prostrate China now seemed only a matter of days...
...writers are impelled by what Mr. Raphaelson calls, a "necessary difficulty." To compare Miss Handy's and Joyce's necessary difficulties" and then to state "as a fact" that the Advocate and the Signature, do not, as a whole, win these laurels "because they have nothing to say" is absurd and irrelevant...
...demands a mode of life more exacting and methodical than a civilian profession could hope to be. To expect a thoroughly liberal college to produce a body of men espable of maintaining the standards of duty and leadership which every Army must have at its base would be as absurd as expecting an Army camp to produce scholars and artists...
...authenticity. Samples: the whole look and feel of Cambridge and Harvard, a generation ago; Horace charming a prospective father-in-law and a gaggle of stockbrokers; Mr. Greenstreet breathily declaring his passion for his low-necked, uninterested wife. But the long-suffering friend, inadvertently no doubt, finally becomes absurd and faintly contemptible. It all adds up to a strained, silly show...
...Just how absurd it all is readers of Storm and Echo will discover. Of his earlier gifts, Prokosch still retains a descriptive talent that can make the heat, the stench, and the occasional beauty of the African jungle almost tangible. Stripped of its pretentious symbolism, its agonized soul-searching, this could have been a good travel book. But the vivid jungle is matted and twined with the perilous Africa cliché, reminiscent of Hollywood's stock treatment: "Well," he muttered, staring up at the constellations, "don't go too deep into Africa. Don't try to grasp...