Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hall) wore the kilt of the gallant Black Watch in World War I and has laughed in the face of reality ever since. His new novel, My Fathers and I, is an escape into the past. It is told by a degenerate descendant of proud ancestors who were greatly absurd but greatly revered. The narrator is Edward G. (for Gratiano) Vanbrugh, a seedily broke antique dealer in a shabby English provincial town. His principal stock, symbolically enough, was a menagerie of Staffordshire China figures-shepherdesses, sailors, heroes of the past. As his narrative unfolds, it turns into a gallery...
College may not be the proper time for this kind of sympathetic attitude; it is the time for scepticism. But scepticism need not be hostile; nor must selfconscious awareness of subjectivity prevent emotional involvement. Nothing would be more absurd than to strive for an artificial warmth or some sort of reinfused provincialism. Kindness and enthusiasm are natural qualities; the problem is to preserve them through college. Harvard offers a challenge to the student to maintain his intellectual intergrity in the face of the fashionable consensus, and to observe, while at college, the standards by which he intends to lead...
...Hollywood Be Thy Name). Others seem to be just a piece-of-mind psychologizing. Last year she went on the air with a Los Angeles TV show called Ad Lib. To the fearful joy of sponsors, Pamela lambasted monogamy as "unnatural," defended premarital sex relations because "it's absurd to stop just when you're most interested," and called for legalization of homosexuality because "it's nobody's business what two adult males do with their sex life...
...heavy reliance on three nurses, who gave testimony damaging to Dr. Adams; brilliant Defense Counsel Geoffrey Lawrence produced the actual sickroom records kept by the nurses, and the discrepancy between what they remembered six years later and what they had actually written down at the time rendered their evidence absurd. Finally, there was the medical mystery of the human constitution: were the injections excessive or were they reasonable to keep the patient comfortable? Were they fatal or would Mrs. Morell have died anyway? Physicians' testimony was neatly split...
...International Conference on Planned Parenthood, Britain's Sir Julian Huxley warned that India's "failure to solve her population problem will be a political and social disaster," while "success will secure her leadership in Asia and give hope to the world at large." Biologist Huxley called it absurd that in India's second five-year plan $14 million is being spent on malaria control, which "will certainly increase population, as against the $10 million for all measures that will reduce it. The balancing of death control by birth control is a matter of utmost urgency." India...