Word: absurdity
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...thick glasses. He kicks, punches, smokes black cigars at 14, reviles his mother's name. His father and Aunt Emily slowly humanize him. He dies of pneumonia at precisely the right moment to make the thwarted lives and love of those two seem quite noble-but a little absurd...
...this Chicago recommendation from sponsoring an "all work and no play" policy. More drastic is a recommendation made last winter (TIME, Jan. 19) by The New York World, which quite omitted the rotating-semester feature, saying with cold logic: "It is absurd for healthy children in high school to have a ten-weeks summer vacation, with weeks off at Christmas and Easter, when their hard-worked fathers, who pay for it all, get little or none...
Months passed. It became clear, for all the absurd extravagance of public rumor, that something unusual was afoot. Last week Mr. John Edwin Barnard, Hon. Secretary of the Royal Microscopical Society, permitted his name to be attached to an announcement: He and his colleagues believed that they had isolated the cancer germ ... A minute disturbance in a ray of light revealed by the most intricate methods of microscopy ever devised... Highly satisfactory experiments upon mice, in whose tissues, inflamed with coal tar, the injected cancer organism produced both sarcoma and carcinoma*. . . Experiments in far too early a stage to warrant...
...more stories of an amazing character were told and believed regarding Woodrow Wilson than any other great American of my time. There has perhaps never been in Washington a high public official more rigid in his personal rectitude than the man now dead. . . . One of the most absurd of these rumors was to the effect that he had become violently insane...
Crawling around on the surface of the earth, burrowing underground, seem absurd occupations for creatures that have learned to fly. Soon men will move their houses and traffic into the upper air entirely. So predicted one Frederick Kiesler, young Viennese architect exhibiting at the Decorative Arts Exposition in Paris, last week. Kiesler had invented nothing, discovered nothing; but his artist-dream seemed hardly less logical and likely than did the skyscraper, the ocean-crossing dirigible, the hovering helicopter, 25 years ago. In the Kiesler dream, enormous steel towers arise, honeycombed with elevators. Hundreds of feet in the air vast platforms...