Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Part of the price of doing business with the Arab world is that many oil companies for more than two decades have quietly complied with a worldwide boycott of Israeli products. But boycotts, like censorship, all too often take on absurd dimensions...
...Administration's usual technique for verbal foreplay, sound wonderfully logical and reasonable at first glance, but appear later on to be little else than intellectual pretense. The intimation that the "professionalism" of the programs is somehow responsible for PBH's inability to accommodate a number of students is patently absurd; that the committee impede funding because these students could not be accommodated is ludicrous. It is fairly obvious that denying funding to such a program is certainly not going to improve conditions; it can only worsen them...
...guards are younger than 34; only 8% are black. To compound Indiana State's age and racial tensions, only a third of the inmates actually work. Boredom is chronic. The prison has only 27 rehabilitation workers; job training is absurd. Since the state provides few tools, vocational classes make do with donated equipment: archaic sewing machines, obsolete typewriters, TV sets dating to Milton Berle...
...fall for a simple trick like that. This may be consistent with Miller's idea, but not with Shakespeare's, for it gives Hamlet no ground for believing that Claudius has done the murder. It makes Guildenstern's lines "The king ... is in his retirement marvelous distempered..." seem absurd, for we have just seen the king perfectly unmoved. Again, in the final scene, Miller creates a contradiction when he has Claudius invite Hamlet to kill him, and willingly accept the poison cup, because his sense of politics makes him realize that he is done for as a king, anyway. This...
Certainly nothing could be more absurd than to hire a small army of godlike brutes, gifted with fantastic speed, coordination, grace, and strength, to move a leather ball up and down the gridiron. This very absurdity, however, serves to intensify the spectator's awareness of the beauty of the game. It is the old story of art for art's sake. Football is a sort of bone-crunching ballet, with an improvised and unpredictable choreography. Like dancers, the players acquire a large repertoire of movements, then spontaneously combine them as they go along...