Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Imperial Virgin. Marion stuttered and blinked simultaneously, but that hardly mattered to Hearst, who spent millions on prototype superspectacles-and happily lost money on most of them, always casting Marion as a kind of imperial virgin. Full of fun and laughter, with a clear eye for the absurd, Marion called him Pops, and liked to run her fingers through his sterling-silver hair. She would have become his wife as well, but Hearst's wife (and still surviving widow) Millicent, herself a former chorine, steadily denied Hearst his request for a divorce...
...walls where little children can see them, or feels compassion for a prostitute, he is not protesting against "the system" or the adult order; he is merely suffering from the way things are, always and everywhere, in a world of insufficient love. He is a self-conscious and sometimes absurd adolescent, but he is also a doomed human being of special sensitivity?not merely special, as Salinger might say, but Special. As such, he sets the theme for almost everything Salinger has written since Catcher. Most men know how to ignore, suppress or outwit the occasional suspicion that the world...
...MEDICINE section [Aug. 11] you have implied that I hold the absurd belief that complete financial reporting by a health or welfare agency destroys a basic right of the people...
Other gondoliers installed outboard motors in their craft and set off at high speed down the waterways. The absurd anachronisms, trumpeting through the muddy canals, finally stirred action as well as municipal nostalgia: Venice authorities agreed to enforce restrictions on motorboats. Victorious, the gondoliers threw out the motors, grabbed their oars, and lazed back at the boats' sterns, safe and somnolent and-temporarily, at least-kings again...
Misalliance (Shaw would insist on spelling the word with a robustly English "i") is a ridiculous play, a fantastical play: it has an absurd plot with nine outlandish characters, it is appallingly epigrammatic, it ridicules all while instructing none--an impossible play, in short, and just the thing for a hot July night...