Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Raving Dervish." Hitler's closest companions found "the homeless derelict from the Viennese melting pot" a normally absurd figure. Many were repelled by "this face that looked like an advertisement for a shaving lotion; this emptiness with the avid, frightened eyes; this sometimes slinking, sometimes hopping, never naturally moving form with its narrow shoulders [and] ridiculously correct suit"; this man who exhorted them "with all the semi-education of his age," using "miserable German . . . defective logic . . . tasteless humor . . . false pathos," and subjected them to "alternate whining and brutality...
...Isaac William Gulp's little girl never lost her style, her poise, her figure. Guests admired the way she appeared on sweltering nights looking cool and handsome in dinner dresses with ruffles. She thought she looked best in yel low and chartreuse. She always had a weakness for absurd headgear and courageously indulged...
...Borras, who "became a Deist, an ardent disciple of Rousseau, and I suspect a Freemason," fled Spain in 1823, settled in Glasgow, and moved to "rural, republican, distinguished, Jeffersonian Virginia. Here, if anywhere, mankind had turned over a new leaf, and in a clean new world, free from all absurd traditions and tyrant mortgages, was beginning to lead a pure life of reason and virtue." In 1835 Grandfather was back in Spain, U.S. consul at Barcelona, appointed by Andrew Jackson at a low point in U.S.-Spanish relations...
...Sups with the Devil. But the proclamation was something more than propaganda: it was a clue to Hitler's strength even in despair, a testimony to his sense of oneness with the German people (always excepting those whom he has confined, abused, murdered). Its awkward rationalizations might seem absurd to free Britons and Americans; they did not seem absurd to Germans who remembered, with Adolf Hitler, the penalties of defeat in World War I, and who now suffered the agonies of defeat in the skies...
...Monstrous Pun. Like the late James Joyce, O'Nolan is a master of the monstrous pun. Erudite, ironic, he devotes many a column to the hilarious systematic destruction of literary cliches, to parodies of Eire's leprechaun literature and the red-taped verbiage of Government service, to absurd home-economics hints. He is an unsparing, beloved critic of devotees of Irish, who overuse Eire's national tongue; a subtler critic of the clerics, who are not unaware of his innuendo and high irony...