Word: absurdum
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...Emily Hahn became the University of Wisconsin's first woman graduate in mining engineering. Several years later she began to smoke cigars, wrote a satirical guide to seduction (Seductio ad Absurdum). In 1930 she turned up in the Belgian Congo wearing shorts and pith helmet, and wrote a book about it (With Naked Foot). After a spell as a reporter in London, footloose Emily's flight from the domestic atmosphere of Winnetka took her in 1935 to newspaper work in Shanghai and an unconventional apartment in the city's red-light district. She stayed in the Orient...
Emily Hahn, rash, black-haired, late-jazz-age authoress (Seductio ad Absurdum) who became Shanghai's favorite ex-New Yorker, deplored the lack of Occidental gossip. Back in the U.S. (via the Gripsholm) for the first time in nine years, the onetime "China Coast Correspondent" of The New Yorker sighed for the Oriental candor she had left behind: "When I talk to my friends, on the phone say, about some man who divorced his wife to run off with her daughter by a former marriage, they say: 'sh-sh, you're back in New York, you know...
Lewis has attempted to bring together two diverse kinds of speech: realistic (the reproduction of natural conversation) and satiric (the reductio ad absurdum of natural conversation). Changing keys back & forth, some of the speech sounds wrong; most of it sounds more than right, being both natural and quintessentially comic. If Lewis is not the complete master of such language modulation, he has at least suggested the difficulties and rewards...
After this reductio ad absurdum, the Navy will probably be permitted next time to break the news of ship losses as soon as it is sure that the enemy knows...
...reductio ad absurdum lies in the Red Cross' refusal to accept Negro blood donations. To add to these inanities by sending colored troops to Southern training camps is a point of friction that can and should be avoided...