Word: absurdities
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...moments in the program when he confronted Westmoreland about his distortion of the enemy troop estimates in the wake of the Tet offensive. Wallace showed that, according to the government figures at the time, the entire North Vietnamese army had been wiped out in Tet. This was, of course, absurd; the North scored an important tactical victory by demonstrating the ability to stage attacks simultaneously in every important South Vietnamese city, and in any case went on fighting for some time thereafter. What the documentary failed to mention, however, was that the illogic of Westmoreland's math was known...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question of Hume not by baffling the grader or fencing with him but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...
Peter Sellars's version of Orlando is not a work of Handel scholarship, any more than Benchley's synopsis is a work of Wagner scholarship. But Benchley's spirit is in many ways Sellars's as well: an abundant wit, a vaguely lunatic sense of the absurd--and just the slightest touch of the tarnhelm...
...abstract expressionist painter; in Grimaud, France. Van Velde's life before World War II was almost a prototype of the lot of the unrecognized artist: hunger, despair and an unending search for patrons. After the war, he attracted supporters who saw in his work a sense of the absurd that reflected the existentialist experience. Commented Playwright Samuel Beckett: "He confronts without restriction and complacency the anguishes of our time...
...wake of his decision two weeks ago to proclaim martial law-"a state of war," as it is called in the Polish constitution. Jaruzelski got his thankless, and perhaps hopeless, job heading the party because he was, and still is, Defense Minister and chief of the armed forces. The absurd logic of his appointment is now complete: he has threatened war against his own people...