Word: absurdly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...barely out of diapers often start taking a thimbleful of diluted wine, Chafetz' proposal would stir only some Gallic shrugs, but most Americans popped a gasket. Did he not know, asked one of his listeners, that drinking is illegal in most schools? The beverage laws, scoffed Chafetz, "are absurd." "Alert your school boards to the dangers of this program," cried Mrs. Fred J. Tooze, president of the W.C.T.U. Mrs. Jennelle Moorhead, national president of the P.T.A., called the idea "outrageous." Iowa Governor Harold E. Hughes, who freely admits to an alcoholic past, said he was "1,000% against...
...choice of plays to be produced will be left up to the students, Chapman said. He said he would insist, however, that they be representative of the genres under study during the semester: the theatre of the absurd, modern expressionist drama, and Oriental theatre...
What the existentialists emphasize about man is that he, alone among other beings, is a decision-making creature blessed, or cursed, with the freedom to choose among a variety of possibilities in an absurd and mysterious existence; to be truly human, man must accept this freedom and conquer the anxiety and despair that threaten it by "commitment" to a way of life. This message can be bracing, notably in the religious version of existentialism, in which the commitment is directed toward a spiritual goal. It can also be nihilistic, notably in the atheistic version, in which commitment is demanded...
This month, however, Judge Robert Sévenier, the Fifth Republic's chief arbiter on the subject, will instruct town clerks to consider family history and local usage in weighing names. Judge Sévenier defends the name game as necessary to protect infants against "inconceivable and often absurd names." Sévenier himself winces at the father in Savoie whose surname was Cocu-Cuckold, and who named his son Parfait-Perfect. The Republic could do nothing: Parfait was a saint who has been revered in France since...
...indelible class system. The Teutonic cast-ironies of Brecht seem manufactured by Krupp. The classic American comic event is the chase, a drolly tangible version of the pursuit of happiness and the American Dream. And the French sex farce is logic run rampant, reason carried to an unreasonable and absurd extremity. That is why French sex farces are innately sexless: Descartes wrote them all. They begin with cogito ergo sum, and they rely not on seduction but sophistry, not on rolled-down beds but revved-up minds, not on fervid matings but frenetic misunderstandings...