Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...stuffing a shirt or making very little sound like even less. And no one has quite the lost-in-a-balloon aplomb or the Mad-King-of-Bavaria hauteur of Cyril Ritchard. At the same time no one knows more surefire tricks. Ritchard will do as many absurd and outrageous things to keep an audience amused as a desperate father will do to make his four-year-old darling...
Inspirational? One Americanism that irritates him, he told reporters, is the word hospitalized. "If a man is hospitalized, what is he when he is cured? De-hospitalized? Homeized?" He deplored the tendency to substitute alibi for excuse, called the phrase bi-partisan foreign policy absurd because it could only mean "doubly partisan." And what, he added, do Americans mean by inspirational-inspired or inspiring...
...hearing almost broke up right then, as reporters bolted for telephones. And as soon as Engine Charlie's latest hit the front pages, the predictable sound-off began in virtually every state. Some called Charlie's statement asinine, illadvised, ridiculous, foolish and absurd. Georgia's governor rapped it as "a dastardly slur," Wyoming's as "an un-American utterance." Major General (ret.) Ellard A. Walsh, 69, president of the potent National Guard Association, called it "a damned lie." The South Carolina house of representatives passed a resolution declaring it an "insult" to the state...
...Marseilles, he became a bit of a heller on a £3OO-a-year allowance from an indulgent uncle. Still in his teens, he ran guns for the Carlist forces in Spain, ran into debt, had an affair with a mysterious femme fatale called Rita. An absurd expatriate from North Carolina named Captain Blunt shot and wounded Conrad in a duel over that lady's honor. For no better reason than that he liked the cut of an English jib, Conrad took off for life with the British merchant service...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question of Hume not by baffling the grader or fencing with him but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...