Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When the swift little stallion was gaveled off at over-the-counter prices in 1957, the suggestion of such a future seemed absurd. His lineage was the best: his sire was the prolific Adios, whose offspring have earned $6,868,930 during the last five seasons; his dam was Debby Hanover, sired by Billy Direct. But Adios Butler was small and unimpressive-looking, and his owner, Horse Breeder Russel Carpenter, mayor of Chester, N.Y., figured he was a loser. Carpenter persuaded Paige West, a lean horse breeder and sulky driver from Snow Hill, Md., to try to bid the price...
...spits when the fans ride him. But he has been a model of gentlemanly deportment compared to last year, when he was thumbed from seven games, had the league in an uproar over such antics as heaving an orange and a baseball (both missed) at Bill Veeck's absurd $300,000 Comiskey Park Scoreboard, which fires rockets and blows horns when White Sox players hit home runs...
...Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov or Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos), Shaw saved some of his sharpest shafts for vocalists. Of the famed Italian Tenor Enrico Tamberlik, appearing in Rossini's Otello, he wrote: "He sings in a doubtful falsetto and his movements are unmeaning, and frequently absurd. For the C sharp in the celebrated duet L'ira d'avverso fato, he substituted a strange description of shriek at about that pitch. The audience, ever appreciative of vocal curiosities, eagerly redemanded...
...Even the minority who want to leave in three years are unlikely to have much concern for secondary education or much explicit interest in making the Freshman year more interesting. It is a less than astonishing result that most students accept Soph Standing for reasons that seem trivial or absurd to those with a broader view...
...Sorokin's warning that modern war is 2000 times worse than the medieval version. Clarence Darrow denounced "poverty-creating big business" as "the cause of all crime." Sinclair Lewis declared that "one-half the people in colleges could be dropped to the advantage of everybody." Lewis denounced grading as "absurd"; whether he heard or not, Dean Hanford agreed enough to propose that separate April and November hour grades be abolished. The head of the Faculty approved this and dropped midyear probations and attendance records for upperclassmen at the same time. The head of the Hygiene Department labelled Stillman Infirmary "inadequate...