[Editor’s Note: @Bartleby is this publication’s attempt to fill the void left by the great William Safire’s “On Language” columns in the Sunday New York Times Magazine which ended their run around the time of his death in 2009. If there any comments, please note my policy as relates thereto: “I would prefer not to make any change.”]
Absurde, Bene, Omnia: The Absurdity of, Well, Everything
Today, your faithful scrivener presents a look at things that simply look or sound absurd. The word “absurd” comes from the Latin “absurdus,” which means “out of tune” (and yes, boys and girls, it is that simple), and related to “surdus,” “deaf,” or “out of
The word “absurd” itself has many meanings and the following will likely encompass all of them. For starters, wildly unreasonable, illogical, or inappropriate, arousing derision, ridiculous, or causing amusement.
The leader of Germany’s Far-Right party, the AfD, or Alternative für Deutschland, is something of a study in contradictions. Alice Weidel, leader of the nationalist and anti-immigrant party, lives not in Germany but in Switzerland, where she is married to a Sri Lankan woman.
Meanwhile, President Trump on Tuesday called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” who took U.S. money to go to war against Russia.
What’s the Safest Form of Travel if Headlines Are Full of Plane Crashes?
Perhaps this was not the right time for this statement, but Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said on the news program “CBS Morning” that flying is the safest form of travel right now.
Bastian is of course right, but in just under a month, the public has been hammered by articles covering nearly ten air crashes.
It is quite true that, statistically, airplanes are the safest form of travel, if one is to consider the total number of air passengers versus death and injury figures. Train travel is next on the list, followed by bus and then boat travel.
Escalators are something that your faithful scrivener has always considered to be the most dangerous form of movement, although I am now chastened after reviewing new statistics from the U.S. government that reveal that people using a staircase are much more at risk, with 1.2 million accidents per year versus approximately 6,000 with escalators. Fortunately, I encounter very few such conveyances, and I would prefer not to make any change.
Over the past two decades, the number of deaths due to an airplane crash have remained in the single digits, and I shan’t even go into the high death rate on the nation’s highways.
William Safire and Edwin Newman, wherever you both are, please take note.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
