the.com/absurdity
the gap between humanity's hunger for meaning and a universe that shrugs back.
means The quality of being ridiculously unreasonable, illogical, or out of harmony with sense — or a particular instance of such nonsense.
from From Latin absurdus, meaning 'out of tune,' and by extension 'irrational, silly.' The root is thought to combine ab- (an intensifier here) with surdus, 'deaf, muffled, dull-sounding' — the same surdus that gives us 'surd' in mathematics. So the original image is auditory: something that grates on the ear like a wrong note. It reached English through French absurdité by the 16th century, the dissonance shifting from sound to sense.
- camus says
- recognizing it should make you rebel, not despair
- legal cousin
- courts toss contracts deemed objectively impossible to perform
- theater move
- playwrights staged meaninglessness with characters waiting for nobody
- latin root
- absurdus meant out of tune, discordant
- comedy fuel
- every punchline exploits expectation crashing into nonsense
waiting for godot — samuel beckett's 1953 play where two men wait for someone who never arrives
the trial — kafka's 1925 novel where josef k. is arrested for an unspecified crime and prosecuted in an incomprehensible system
the stranger — camus's 1942 novel about meursault, who commits murder and remains emotionally detached throughout his trial