Word: absurdity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Next comes Tobin's invocation of "moral reversal." I suppose Tobin is arguing that religion should play no role in morality for those who are religious (still a majority of the population, especially in middle America). The implications of such an argument are so absurd they need not be addressed...
...banana battle grows increasingly absurd as it threatens to spread to other food groups, from ham and cheese to wafers and waffles, and to such oddities as candles, cashmere sweaters and model trains. That's because the U.S. targeted for tariffs 17 European exports chosen to "gain the most leverage" over European protectionists. How? Mainly by targeting the British, French and Italians, who have pushed to restrict Latin bananas and to favor those grown in former European colonies, like Martinique and Cameroon...
Heard the one about the common shampoo ingredient that causes cancer? Or how about the epidemic of blindness among toddlers who accidentally get waterproof sunscreen in their eyes? These absurd fictions used to be the stock-in-trade of ninth-graders bent on frightening the younger kids. But now such tall tales are appearing on the Internet, and many adults are taking them seriously...
...GeoCities into its shopping basket. The latest deal makes Yahoo much bigger, second only in reach to the mighty America Online. Quite a feat if you consider that no one's browser comes preloaded with a Yahoo home page. And what a validation for GeoCities, a company that seemed absurd as recently as last year -- will anyone ever make money on free web sites...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumption 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 fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...