Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Everyone has felt that the prices at some of these bookstores are absurd," he said. "The exchange is a way for students to sell some of their books at a higher price than they'll get from used bookstores around here...
...mall kids to pseudo-intellectuals on campus are buying rock records and going to concerts seeking a genuine emotional experience when what they are really receiving is one that's once removed. Rock 'n roll these days is similar to the concept behind stonewashed jeans (the most trite and absurd and tacky of recent fashion statements). It's a way for people to buy a look of wear and tear, to look like they've been places, to appear raw and experienced when in fact they're living sheltered easy lives that afford them the capital to buy a life...
...deal also raises the salary competition among executives to absurd levels. Says John Swearingen, former chairman of Standard Oil of Indiana: "There is a limit to what managers ought to be paid for managing other people's money." Adds a top executive involved in a current takeover: "The yardstick for compensation has just gotten twelve inches longer. The chief executive who's doing a first-class job running a major U.S. corporation for $890,000 a year is going to start thinking he's some kind of a fool...
Naked Gun's script thrives on the same groaner puns and absurd hyperbole that distinguished Airplane! When the movie's villain, played with oily elegance by Ricardo Montalban, offers Nielsen a cigar he says, "Cuban?" "No," replies Nielsen, "I'm Dutch-Irish." Montalban's dignified demeanor is a perfect foil to Nielsen's hapless bumbling...
...independence has not spread considerably farther -- yet. Under Leonid Brezhnev, Soviet nationality policy seemed to mean that national groups could organize the likes of folkloric song and dance companies, but that the major decisions affecting the welfare of national groups were made in Moscow. Bureaucratic centralization reached such absurd dimensions that, as a Lithuanian once complained, "Ivan Petrovich must rule on the opening times for toilets in towns with names he cannot even pronounce...