Arousing derision

Usage examples of absurd.

Christians reject the allegorizing of the Jews, and yet traditionally accept, on their authority, doctrines which can be deduced from their Scriptures in no other way than by the absurd hypothesis of a double or mystic sense.

Through the absurd extravagances of poets and augurs, and through the growth of critical thought, this unbelief went on increasing from the days of Anaxagoras, when it was death to call the sun a ball of fire, to the days of Catiline, when Julius Casar could be chosen Pontifex Maximus, almost before the Senate had ceased to reverberate his voice openly asserting that death was the utter end of man.

Starting from an antipodal position, Kundera shares with Leclerc that sense of hovering at the borderline where a thought or situation, stretched to maximum intensity, teeters on the brink of collapse into the ridiculous or the absurd.

A few saintly personalities stand out amidst a roiling sea of jealousies, ambition, backbiting, suppression of dissent, and absurd conceits.

They thought it equally absurd and sinful for a man to carry his income on his back, and bedizen himself out in reds, blues, and greens, ribbons, knots, slashes, and treble quadruple daedalian ruffs, built up on iron and timber, which have more arches in them for pride than London Bridge for use.

No, it was too absurd, and, if Gordon had a wife of his own, why in the name of justice should not Bernard have one?

The north of Europe has its Gascons as well as the south of France, and the junior portion of the Russian army at this period assumed an absurd braggadocio tone.

The price of provisions, and bread in particular, being raised to an exorbitant rate in consequence of an absurd exportation of corn, for the sake of the bounty, a formidable body of colliers, and other labouring people, raised an insurrection at Bristol, began to plunder the corn vessels in the harbour, and commit such outrages in the city, that the magistrates were obliged to have recourse to military power.

An absurd thought flashed into his mind: did somebody not tell him once that Roy Mallender had boxed for Millfield?

Persons like Larcom do make such absurd blunders, and so misapprehend the conversation of educated people.

These three persons, thus accused, were brought to the bar of the house, notwithstanding the strenuous remonstrances of several members, who opposed this method of proceeding, as a species of oppression equally arbitrary and absurd.

She leaves him gentle and absurd gifts as apology currants, offprints, lozenges at the first hint of a cough.

When the thing is maintained, not as a mere windy sentimentality, but with some notion of carrying it logically, the result is invariably a display of paralogy so absurd that it becomes pathetic.

It is an absurd disregard of a natural economy to leave the innate philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated.

His expression was as simple as resentment without understanding can be: now like plesiosaurus laboring all four limbs for the paddles they were, lifting a small head to see pterodactyl raise its absurd body on more absurd wings and with cumbrous scaling gain the sky, a ridiculous place to be, certainly, but for that moment he watched, disconcerting to plesiosaurus, to whom no such extravagance had ever occurred and who, by no feat of skill or imagination, could hope to accomplish it now.