30 October 2017
travesty
[trav-uh-stee]
noun, plural travesties.
1. a grotesque or debased likeness or imitation:
a travesty of justice.
2. a literary or artistic burlesque of a serious work or subject, characterized by grotesque or ludicrous incongruity of style, treatment, or subject matter.
3. a literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.
verb (used with object), travestied, travestying.
4. to make a travesty on; turn (a serious work or subject) to ridicule by burlesquing.
5. to imitate grotesquely or absurdly.
Origin of travesty
French, Italian
1655-1665; French travesti, past participle of travestir “to disguise” < Italian travestire, equivalent to tra- (Latin trāns- trans- ) + vestire “to clothe”; Latin vestīre; see vest
Related forms
untravestied, adjective
Synonyms
1. mockery, perversion, sham, distortion.
Synonym Study
2. See burlesque.
Dictionary.com
Examples from the Web for travesty
Contemporary Examples
To connoisseurs of smoked fish such confusion would be a travesty.
Queen Victoria’s Secret Scottish Sex Castle
Clive Irving
August 16, 2014
Then there was that 80-14 travesty against Idaho, a team that won just one out of eleven games all season.
The Heisman ‘Bad Boys’: Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel, and Who Should Really Win
Allen Barra
December 13, 2013
One of the defense attorneys for Zimmerman said he was glad the outcome did not turn a tragedy into travesty.
Not This Again: The Ghost of Past Injustices, From the Draft Riots to Trayvon
Herb Boyd
July 14, 2013
Anagram
stave try
arty vest
Today’s quotes
True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it.
– Daniel Goleman
On this day
30 October 1920 – the Communist Party of Australia founded in Sydney, New South Wales.
30 October 1938 – Fear of alien invasion panics the United States as Orson Welles narrates the H.G. Wells radio-play, War of the Worlds (click for the complete broadcast). Listeners did not realise it was just a play, unleashing havoc across the U.S.
30 October 1939 – birth of Grace Slick, American rock singer with Jefferson Airplane and as a solo performer.
30 October 1961 – the Soviet Union detonates the world’s largest nuclear bomb, the Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of 50 megatons. It was 4,000 times more powerful than the bomb the USA dropped on Hiroshima, 1,400 times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 times the combined power of all conventional explosives used in World War II, and one quarter of the estimated yield of the 27 August 1883 volcanic explosion in Krakatoa. The crown of the mushroom cloud was more than 56km high and was visible for hundreds of kilometres. The Soviets had initially intended for the Hydrogen Bomb to be 100 megatons, but decided to tone it back a tad. The United Nations pleads with both the Soviet Union and the United States to end the arms race or risk destroying the planet. By 1986, with the arms race out of control, the U.S.A. deployed the MX-missiles. Each missile had 10 warheads capable of carrying 300 megatons each, with a potential combined yield 60 times the Tsar Bomba (240,000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 15 times the size of Krakatoa) … a dream come true for Marvin the Martian … but … the MX’s were never detonated (‘where’s the kaboom?‘). They were retired in 2005.
30 October 1990 – the ‘Chunnel’ (or Channel Tunnel) is completed linking England and France by a tunnel that goes under the English Channel.