All 4 Uses
irrelevant
in
Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool
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- Tolstoy then makes a sort of exposition of the plot of KING LEAR, finding it at every step to be stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious and full of incredible events, "wild ravings", "mirthless jokes", anachronisms, irrelevancies, obscenities, worn-out stage conventions and other faults both moral and aesthetic.†
irrelevancies = things that are not relevant (not related to the subject being considered, or not important enough to want to consider)
- He objects, with some justification, to the raggedness of Shakespeare's plays, the irrelevancies, the incredible plots, the exaggerated language: but what at bottom he probably most dislikes is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take—not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life.†
- Shakespeare was not a systematic thinker, his most serious thoughts are uttered irrelevantly or indirectly, and we do not know to what extent he wrote with a "purpose" or even how much of the work attributed to him was actually written by him.†
*irrelevantly = in a manner that is not relevant (not related to the subject being considered, or not important enough to want to consider)
- Even the irrelevancies that litter every one of his plays—the puns and riddles, the lists of names, the scraps of "reportage" like the conversation of the carriers in HENRY IV the bawdy jokes, the rescued fragments of forgotten ballads—are merely the products of excessive vitality.†
irrelevancies = things that are not relevant (not related to the subject being considered, or not important enough to want to consider)
Definitions:
-
(1)
(irrelevant) not relevant (not related to the subject being considered, or not important enough to want to consider)
- (2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)