Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...heart of his argument is a reduction ad absurdum: The President's job is to execute the laws. He does this through the agency of some 800,000 Federal employes. If he cannot discharge all, he cannot discharge any of them without Senatorial consent. Then 1) when the Senate is not in session no one can be ousted; 2) the Senate could confer life tenure. Furthermore, the party in control of Congress during the short session after a Presidential election could, with the support of the outgoing President, or with a two-thirds majority, enact a law which would...
...Charles Blount Jr. '18 writing from Lyon, France, to the Alumni Bulletin makes use of the familiar "reductio ad absurdum" argument to demolish the case of those who contend that no one should "deny to any young man the opportunities of a Harvard education." And he indulges in some caustic irony at the expense of those who, on the grounds of democracy and liberalism, would throw open the gates to every eager young...
RAIN?Jeanne Eagels knocks the spirit of the blue-laws for a row of foreign missionaries in a gorgeous reductio ad absurdum of inbred Puritanism, accompanied onstage by a tropical downpour that makes you wonder why you forgot your umbrella...
...have the fastest locomotives, the biggest hotels, the longest railroads, and the largest crops in the world, and 'these measurements are their chief justification. Not how fine but how much is our motto, and the circus has made of this article of American faith a dazzling reductio ad absurdum. The influence of Barnum, the father of Buncombe, on American culture is incalculable. The whole paraphernalia of circus terminology has been lifted bodily from the circus by the moving picture people, who measure their productions, not in dramatic values, but in thrills, shocks and statistics. The same thing is true...
...highest rank of undergraduate aristocracy, unless he is supported by his father or guardian". In such fashion does the New York Times cast doubt upon the wisdom of the "present purging". And although we recognize that such a danger is possible if the purification be carried ad absurdum, the true value of amateur rulings depends not on their phrasing or their explicitness but upon the spirit in which they are enforced...