Word: absurd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was Giovanni Boldini's wispy Duchess of Marlborough propped stiffly on her spindly divan; Whistler had caught bewhiskered Theodore Duret wistfully holding a lady's opera cape in some carpeted corridor. And William M. Chase had come upon the bemonocled Whistler sporting an absurd little cane and striking his dandy's pose. But most of the Edwardians represented at the museum (the Phelps Stokeses, the Wyndham sisters, Mme. Gautreau, Miss Ada Rehan, Henry Marquand) had sought out, or been sought out by, the slickest and most fashionable painter of their day to immortalize them -John Singer...
Literary Caveman Horace McCoy has driven to an absurd extreme the hardboiled, feel-my-muscles style of James Cain and Dashiell Hammett, and, to add cultural tone, has dipped into the bowely bathos of the wasn't-Bix-wonderful, oh-blow-that-beautiful-horn school. The result is a gutter-minded, gutter-tongued shocker of alley-cat sex, sadism and unmourned murders-relieved only by odes to Satchmo's and Muggsy's horn blowing...
...Toynbee warns, it would be absurd for us to imagine that this transoceanic shift of the Western-Christian heritage is likely to ensure "Western ascendancy" for very long. Political unification of the world "in the near future" is, he thinks, a "foregone conclusion," and once it is achieved, orthodox Christianity will be as old-fashioned as "parish-pump politics." Our descendants, as well as the descendants of our Oriental contemporaries, will be heirs to a religion and a civilization distilled from the teachings of many spiritual messiahs, including Confucius, Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Zarathustra and Mohamed...
...music from the outside with a long pointed stick, but he can never get at the real essence. To anyone in the audience last night, the meaning could be realized. An attempt to convey that realization to anyone else by a deal of linguistic virtuosity would be quite absurd...
...Christianity with which America is familiar is distorted, confused, and almost absurd." This sweeping charge is based on a study of 50 examination papers from a college sophomore class. Author of the study is the teacher of the class, writing anonymously in the current bi-monthly Religious Education. Almost all the students, says he, came from religious homes, had regularly attended Sunday school, and had just completed a semester's survey of religion which included five weeks of Bible study...