Word: absurdness
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...ever-evolving scripts, the comfort he gets from working with actors he respects, and the rush of hearing a laugh, or a gasp, from an audience lost in the drama he's created. In short, he says, "I'm a people person." Then he laughs. Because he knows how absurd it is for him, the bad boy of American theater, to speak in sunny, New Age banalities. And he knows that anyone familiar with his work probably wouldn't believe him, anyway. After all, he's the guy who wrote The Distance From Here, in which a teenager drowns...
...what also shows up is a surprising attitude of skepticism. "We get plenty of nonsense," admits Charles Tolbert, an astronomer at the University of Virginia and the S.S.E.'s president. "Sometimes you know just five minutes into a talk that it's absurd. But you also hear things that make you think." Like Tolbert, many of the scientists here are on the faculty at major universities, and were doing fine at conventional research. But sometimes that gets boring. "I was plodding along, adding a little to a large body of knowledge," says Garret Moddel, an engineering professor at the University...
Your article seemed to suggest that college students are divided into two groups: professed Christians-who abstain from drugs, alcohol, premarital sex and other vices-and all other students, who indulge in continuous debauchery. That is absurd. When I was a college student, I didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't go to many parties. And I graduated with high honors. But I was a liberal agnostic, not a Christian. For anyone to imply that all non-Christian students are immoral is insulting and misleading...
...further discussion of the O.A. is quite to the point—he himself realizes its superiority to any E., however A. His illustration includes one of the key “Wake Up the Grader” phrases—“It is absurd.” What force! What gall! What fun! “Ridiculous,” “hopeless,” “nonsense,” on the one hand; “doubtless,” “obvious,” “unquestionable...
...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 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...