Word: absurdum
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...worth 1% to have a Fidelity expert guide me through the financial maze created by Fidelity and its rivals. Nevertheless, the wraparound account is a reductio ad absurdum. "Put Fidelity's Renowned Investment Management Expertise to Work For You," blares the brochure. That is what I thought I was doing when I invested in a Fidelity mutual fund. Now I'm told I must pay someone to tell me which mutual fund I should buy. Then I pay the mutual-fund managers to put me into the right stocks and bonds...
...result of many of these comments is alienation and antagonism. Most of us have been there. Reducio ad absurdum; unnecessary roughness in the heat of argument; insults exchanged for no reason. It happens all the time...
...reductio ad absurdum of right-wing p.c. may be the opposition to Tara J. O'Toole, Clinton's nominee for Assistant Secretary of Energy. O'Toole's nomination has been held up by two Republican Senators because -- and follow this closely, please -- she belongs to a study group that once had the name Marxist Feminist Group. The group, which meets about three times a year, changed its name to Northeast Feminist Scholars years before O'Toole joined it. The Administration wrote the Senate that O'Toole "has never endorsed Marxist theory, nor has she ever had the impression that...
...factors. First, the shortening supply of American collections that actually contain the kind of things a great museum would want to have. (The 1980s produced shoals of zillionaires but few connoisseurs.) And second, a fashion among the rich for making their own "vanity" museums, a practice whose reductio ad absurdum was reached by places like the Terra Museum of American Art in Chicago and the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles -- a $100 million shell with maybe six paintings of quality inside...
This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser...