Word: absurdities
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...instead of fireman). Yet browsers will find as well the stamp of acceptance on the dreadful herstory ("an alternative form to distinguish or emphasize the particular experience of women"); the execrable womyn ("alternative spelling to avoid the suggestion of sexism perceived in the sequence m-e-n"); and the absurd wait-person (waiter or waitress) and waitron ("a person of either sex who waits on tables"). Future lexicons, perhaps, will give us waitoid (a person of indeterminate sex who waits on tables...
...SOCCER WAR by Ryszard Kapuscinski (Knopf; $21). Back when Hunter S. Thompson still needed a road map to find Las Vegas, this Polish journalist was taking absurd, gonzo risks in the Third World. This is a breezy compilation of anecdotes recalled from the years he spent covering Africa and Latin America. Kapuscinski displays a keen empathy with the aspirations, however inchoate, of people who have glimpsed freedom for the first time...
...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...
...reaction from the book's subjects has been just as hot. Nancy Reagan has thus far refused any comment, though friends described her as "profoundly upset" at Kelley's attack. Ronald Reagan put out a statement seething with outrage: "The flagrant and absurd falsehoods . . . clearly exceed the bounds of decency." A phalanx of Reagan friends and former advisers lashed out at the book, both in whole and in parts. Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, charged that there are 20 factual errors in the passages involving her alone. She described the purported Nancy Reagan-Frank Sinatra tryst...
...first collage painting, Celebes, 1921, is one of his funniest. It started life as an anthropological photo of an African corn bin. This reminded Ernst of an elephant. Then he saw a swollen human figure in it -- a failed behemoth, which he associated with the absurd and nasty king of Alfred Jarry's proto-Surrealist comedy, Ubu Roi. Add to that a dirty children's rhyme he remembered from his school days, which in English would have been a limerick; it concerned an elephant in Sumatra that tried to, well, connect with its grandmother. The naked woman in the foreground...