Word: absurd
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
CARSWELL'S further discussion of the O.A. is quite to the point--he himself realizes its superiority to any E., however A. His illustration includes one of the key "Wake Up the Grader" phrases--"It is absurd." What force! What gall! What fun! "Ridiculous," "hopeless," "nonsense," on the one hand; "doubtless," "obvious," "unquestionable," on the other, will have the same effect. A hint of nostalgic, antiacademic languor at this stage as well may match the grader's own mood: "It seems more than obvious to one entangled in the petty quibbles of contemporary Medievalists--at times, indeed, approaching the ludicrous...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or by fencing with him but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all Hume did not live in a vacuum...
Apartheid is alive and more than a little absurd in the South African town of Boksburg (pop. 106,000). Ever since rightists took over the town's city council last year, they have been strictly enforcing the whites-only laws that had fallen into disuse. They began by barring blacks from all municipal facilities, including the local park and lake. The obsession with racist regulations took on surreal dimensions last week when the council voted 10 to 7 to grant the transfer of a lease for the Golden Lake Chinese restaurant from W.G. Ho to another Chinese woman...
...Undergraduate Council may, depending on how they vote, pay $50,000 to bring Suzanne Vega to campus. This is absolutely absurd. The Council should get out of the concert promotion business and quickly...
...1800s brought hordes of prospectors, beginning a boom-and-bust cycle that continues to this day. Says Celia Hunter, a lodge keeper who came to the territory 42 years ago: "Alaskans have always looked for the big bang that would solve all their problems." Some development schemes were downright absurd. In the late 1950s, Hunter helped quash a proposal to use atom bombs to blast an artificial harbor out of the northern coast. "The argument even then was jobs, jobs, jobs," she says...