What's the difference between absurd and nonsense?

Absurd


Definition:

  • (a.) Contrary to reason or propriety; obviously and fiatly opposed to manifest truth; inconsistent with the plain dictates of common sense; logically contradictory; nonsensical; ridiculous; as, an absurd person, an absurd opinion; an absurd dream.
  • (n.) An absurdity.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But Steven Brounstein, a lawyer for one of the officers, said: 'For the DA to be equating this case to a drive-by shooting is absurd.
  • (2) Historically, what made SNL’s campaign coverage so necessary was its ability to highlight the subtle absurdities of the election and exaggerate the ridiculous.
  • (3) In any halfway-awake western nation, and, to be frank, in many reaches of British national life, this would be considered an amateurish absurdity, a guarantee of eventual failure.
  • (4) But the same court also just refused to hear an appeal of a Minnesota woman who's been ordered to pay more than $220,000 for downloading two-dozen songs – a testament to Congress' gift to Hollywood and its allies in the form of absurdly stiff penalties for minor infringement.
  • (5) I think the heart of good comedy really lives in truth and reacting to the absurdities, hypocrisies, abuses of power in the world.” Late night television is a no longer a glass of warm milk before bed, it’s a lunch buffet And as TV viewership declines and internet virality becomes as important as real-time eyeballs, cable networks might find that topical comedy is a smart, cost-effective way to grab cross-platform attention.
  • (6) It might seem absurd, but she also fretted about the horrendous poll tax bills received by people she knew, people she knew couldn't pay.
  • (7) He would have seen the absurdity in a chancellor admitting that his sums are so badly out that Britain will borrow more than double this year than the £37bn he originally promised – and claiming that as a triumph.
  • (8) The idea that opposition to the renewal of Trident is an extreme policy confined to the British left is absurd.
  • (9) SC, Manchester Spark Energy, one of Britain's smaller electricity suppliers, failed to notice that your bill was absurd.
  • (10) British officials said it was absurd that at one point Merkel seemed to want to remove most references to the eurozone crisis from the communique.
  • (11) Harry Kane, reminding everyone how absurd it was to think his confidence might be broken, may just have to accept this will not be a night that is remembered for his goal.
  • (12) Karl Habsburg-Lothringen supported his cousin's action: "The Habsburg law is absurd, there's nothing else to be said about it.
  • (13) In fact, the body of evidence about how much it matters is mushrooming, so that it seems almost absurd to anyone who knows anything about children's development that we still think that a baby's physical health at the birth is all that matters.
  • (14) Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling breached all those, absurdly calling objectors 'job snobs'.
  • (15) Last month, along with Slovenia, Croatia and non-EU members Serbia and Macedonia, Austria – which has rejected Brussels’ criticism of its policy as “absurd” – imposed strict new restrictions, including a daily cap on the number of asylum seekers and migrants they would allow to enter their territory.
  • (16) Absurdly, the shops lack local staples – sugar, milk, flour – but are well stocked with subsidised imports such as single-malt whisky and Italian panettone.
  • (17) The idea that human breastmilk may not be good enough for human babies is clearly absurd.
  • (18) The woman snaps out of bed and opens her eyes, absurdly conscious and alive, wonderfully lucid.
  • (19) We are talking here about the absurd.” Ah, the absurd.
  • (20) Each sentence seems more absurd than the last until you are finally and irredeemably overwhelmed by its relentless meaningful meaninglessness.

Nonsense


Definition:

  • (n.) That which is not sense, or has no sense; words, or language, which have no meaning, or which convey no intelligible ideas; absurdity.
  • (n.) Trifles; things of no importance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Virtually every developed country has some form of property tax, so the idea that valuing residential property is uniquely difficult, or that it would be widely evaded, is nonsense.
  • (2) To this end, a meiosis-defective mating-type mutation was used as a marker for the plus segment, by taking advantage of its suppressibility by a nonsense suppressor.
  • (3) Real ear CVRs, calculated from real ear recordings of nonsense syllables, were obtained from eight hearing-impaired listeners.
  • (4) The first paper of this series (Picheny, Durlach, & Braida, 1985) presented evidence that there are substantial intelligibility differences for hearing-impaired listeners between nonsense sentences spoken in a conversational manner and spoken with the effort to produce clear speech.
  • (5) These data suggest that yeast tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase interacts with positions 34 and 35 of the anticodon of tRNATyr and opens the possibility that nonsense suppressor efficiency may be mediated by the level of aminoacylation.
  • (6) But this no-nonsense venue, just 10km but a world away from parliament, is the latest stop in a national pro-renewables tour that is making the Abbott government decidedly uncomfortable.
  • (7) Free recall of nonsense syllables was significantly better when these were learned under active compound.
  • (8) "It is clear this is a government which is short of ideas, desperately trying to bring up nonsensical diversions to distract attention from the situation in the country.
  • (9) Four regA mutants (regA1, regA8, regA11, and regA15) failed to make a protein having a molecular weight of about 12,000, whereas mutant regA9 did make such a protein; regA15 produced a new, apparently smaller protein that was presumably a nonsense fragment, whereas regA11 produced a new, apparently larger protein.
  • (10) In the first, span and free-recall measures were obtained for 24 subjects, each tested with four types of spoken material (nonsense syllables, random words, fourth-order approximations to English, and normal prose).
  • (11) I’d have been a TV celeb type, done these albums that are nonsense – and yeah, with hindsight, that wouldn’t have been a bad idea.
  • (12) In addition, purified protein of 62,000 daltons, resulting from the suppression of the nonsense mutations tox-30 and tox-45, will react with antisera purified against the terminal 17,000 daltons of the toxin molecule and are immunologically identical to toxin by radial immunodiffusion.
  • (13) The other three carry nonsense mutations which inactivate both the excision repair and essential functions.
  • (14) La Manga in Spain is an example of human nonsense: 20km of city length, two kilometres wide, with huge buildings all along,” said Couet.
  • (15) In a sign of Labour's need to avoid tension with business, Darling was careful to stress he was not criticising the signatories but said: "I wonder if one of their finance directors came to them and said 'look, we have this wonderful idea, and we are going to pay with it by savings we have not yet identified and by calculations we cannot verify', they would say 'that is complete nonsense'."
  • (16) The mutation, which is not of the common CG-to-TG type, is at the same codon in which both nonsense and a different missense (Arg to Gln) have previously been observed.
  • (17) Introduction of an ochre nonsense codon into the reading frame of the leader peptide sequence leads to considerable reduction of the basal expression and loss of inducibility of the cat gene.
  • (18) On the Iraq war, he admitted he had voted in favour of military action in 2003 though he said he thought at the time that Blair's claims about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were "nonsense".
  • (19) Two nonsense mutations at codon positions 33 and 187 and an aberrant splice site were found in the human gene.
  • (20) The studies on the reverse mutation of osm3 indicated that this osmotic-sensitivity arises from a missense or nonsense mutation in OSM3 locus.