Word: absurdness
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...still, why should Mr. Moore want to go to Peru? Peru is far away. Lima society is exciting, but very limited. After Madrid, Mr. Moore would find it paltry if not provincial. And aside from the absurd Tacna-Arica dispute, in which the U. S. is a laughed-at arbiter, no momentous Peruvian problem awaits solution by a stalwart U. S. patriot. True, there is talk that U. S. bankers are planning handsome developments, which is to say exploitations, in Peru. But Mr. Moore, with all the money a man could decently desire, is far above being a dollar diplomatist...
This move took a lot of wind out of the next figure on the scene, who was none other than Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill") Thompson of Chicago, self-anointed savior of the Mississippi Basin. He blustered into town calling the Coolidge compromise plan "absurd," saying he had come (as chairman of the Thompson-invented Flood Control Conference) to put over the Reid bill. President Coolidge invited him to luncheon. When he heard about the Madden appointment and President Coolidge's willingness to waive the question of State-shared costs, except in principle, for the present, so that work...
...Watson. No one knows better than James E. Watson of Indiana how absurd it is to think that James E. Watson of Indiana could ever become President of the U. S. But politics is like baseball. Getting men on bases is what counts. A base on balls is as good as a clean single if there is a home-run slugger in the lineup. The total runs, not the hits, win the game. In the Republican league, James E. Watson plays on the anti-Hoover team, whose hardest hitter in June may well be James E. Watson's good...
...which black men, defenseless save for shield and spear, commit a bloody regicide serves as a gruelling climax. The Drums of Love. Lovers long ago defeated in their love have brightened many a story with golden shadows of a picturesque despair. Now, under a title which is highly absurd and which has reference to nothing except the box-offices of small-town theatres, with a background of South American rather than Italian roads and castles, is told the medieval legend of Paolo and Francesca. A huge, hunchbacked, hirsute grandee marries a small and beautiful lady who loves his handsome brother...
...enormous success was in part due to the fact that many painfully unobservant readers attributed it to famed George Eliot, whose works it resembled in certain details. In 1891, before literary England had properly heard of George Bernard Shaw, before Oscar Wilde was a bad name, before ten final absurd years had burned up in a bright sputter for the end of a smoldering century, Thomas Hardy had written Tess of the D'Urbervilles, the most famous of all his fine, austere, tempestuous novels. Four years later he had written Jude the Obscure, the saddest, the last...