Definition

deviating from what is normal or expected; abnormal or unusual

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Excerpts from News Articles

This group spent weeks assembling its report, which Trump released as one of the last acts of his presidency, on Martin Luther King Day. Written without input from any scholars who specialize in American history, it sought to reinforce the exceptional nature of our country, and to put forth a “patriotic” narrative that downplays racism and inequality and emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation, and ongoing racial injustice as aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.

Logo 2023-02-10 Literary Hub

Carbon-14 dating is, in theory, useful, but it faces several difficulties: it is a destructive method, because samples have to be taken and crushed. These samples are often contaminated and give aberrant results. And even when they are correct, the results have to be calibrated, and one sometimes ends up with several possible and rather imprecise dates.

Logo 2023-03-22 The Conversation

The volume of tournament chaos is an aberration . But the stunners aren’t going away. More teams seeded Nos. 13-15 are going to knock off half-baked giants who didn’t learn enough about themselves during the regular season. Maybe it will even become standard for a No. 16 to break through once every five years. The drama of the unforeseen is good for March Madness, but when there is too much, it will lead to black-eye endings.

Logo 2023-04-04 The Washington Post

The other was that Trump would respond with such fury and incitement that he would rip even deeper divides in a nation estranged by his aberrant presidency and stoke new turmoil that could further damage vital political and judicial institutions.

Logo 2023-04-05 CNN News

MP Olga Givernet from Macron’s Renaissance party argued in a statement emailed to the press last month that the Fifth Republic has led France to greater stability and is not a "democratic aberration ".

Logo 2023-04-05 EURO News

McCaughey, for his part, is arguing for a sentence of a year in prison, contending that his crimes on Jan. 6 were an “ aberration ” in an otherwise law-abiding life.

Logo 2023-04-07 Politico

This might be viewed as an aberration , or merely an unfortunate circumstance for Diarra. Perhaps he was handcuffed to his hospital bed because police couldn’t immediately discern that he was a hero, rather than a perpetrator, so it was just a placeholder to charge him. That might be believable if not for Bragg’s pattern of trying to punish people who defend themselves.

Logo 2023-04-13 RT News

“Children are taken on grounds of neglect where there isn’t any evidence of severe abuse,” said Roberts, the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families – and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World. “We could imagine a better way of dealing with the families’ and the children’s needs without resorting to this traumatic intervention of seizing children. We shouldn’t think of them as aberrant cases.”

Logo 2023-04-14 The Guardian

“You are remorseful and I don’t need to be concerned about you doing something like this again,” the judge said. But he cited the “strong need” to deter others and promote respect for the law, while adding that he was reducing McCaughey’s punishment because of his youth — he is 25 — and statements of support from friends, colleagues and clients that showed his offense was a “strange aberration .”

Logo 2023-04-14 The Washington Post

“I suspect we’ll find that this story doesn’t represent anything universal about the great city of San Francisco,” said Jeff Lawson, chief executive of the tech communications company Twilio, whose offices are just a few blocks from where Mr. Lee was killed. “Rather, it is a tragic aberration , the result of an interpersonal conflict — the kind that can happen in any city and time.”

Logo 2023-04-14 The New York Times

How can we so confidently predict this turn? Because ever since Rupert Murdoch busted out of Adelaide, Australia, ever since he conquered the newspaper market in England, ever since he came to dominate cable news with Fox, he’s paid his way out of jams. The Dominion case and the similar Smartmatic case that awaits its place in the defamation docket, are not aberrations for Fox. It’s all a part of Murdoch’s way of doing business.

Logo 2023-04-18 Politico

Science and religion have historically been united on one thing, and perhaps only one thing: controlling the body, whether through convention or shame, hormones or genes, is acceptable when it comes to women, and runs a gamut from peculiar to aberrant when it comes to men.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Guardian

A six-week trial, especially if it ended in a victory for Dominion, could have demonstrated to the public in painstaking detail what an abject aberration Fox has become among American news organizations. In-person testimony would have illustrated what the pre-trial evidence had begun to show: that Fox hosts and executives knew full well that the conspiracy theories they peddled about the outcome of the 2020 election were false, but they broadcast them anyway to hang on to viewers who didn’t want to hear the truth.

Logo 2023-04-19 The New York Times

The zebrafish is particularly interesting. Strains bred independently in laboratories for 30 or 40 years have aberrant sex ratios and multiple sex genes.

Logo 2023-04-19 The Conversation

This will not be a rerun of 2020, however, even if Trump ends up as the Republican nominee. Four years ago, Biden was the challenger who could portray himself as the antidote to the chaos and division of the Trump years, the low-key but experienced hand who would rescue the country from an aberrant incumbent.

Logo 2023-04-25 The Washington Post

It was (the gay) Austro-Hungarian writer and activist Karl Maria Benkert who coined the term “homosexual” in 1868, but psychiatrist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathatia Sexualis which proved resilient in judicial and medical application. Same-sex attraction, in Krafft-Ebing’s opinion, was aberrant . Freud, influenced by Krafft-Ebing, believed everyone to be bisexual, although his thinking on matters of sexuality changed throughout his career. The word “lesbian” derives from the island on which Sappho lived, Lesbos. Its first usage was in a medical dictionary in 1890.

Logo 2023-04-25 The Guardian

But he insisted that the US would still meet its climate targets. “President Biden has reiterated a full-fledged commitment to keep our target, we’re not moving on our target,” he said. “This one thing is not an aberration in terms of us walking back on our goals, or walking back on our expectations. I feel very confident about that.”

Logo 2023-04-25 The Guardian

But prosecutor Jason Casey said in court that Lieber “was someone willing to lie and deceive to protect what mattered to him most — and that was his career.” His behavior was not an aberration , but occurred over a period of several years.

Logo 2023-04-26 Politico

There are strong opinions, of course, about what roasts are appropriate for Yorkshire accompaniment. The received wisdom today seems to be that Yorkshires are essential with beef but an aberration with any other meat. (My husband is one of these tedious purists.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Spectator

She notes that “present-day conversations around non-motherhood tend to frame today’s young women as a historical aberration ,” a population with unprecedented reproductive freedoms, but long before the development of hormonal birth control, more exotic contraceptives were available: “Medical treatises dating back to the Middle Ages in Europe list dozens of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients,” and an “Egyptian papyrus from nearly four millennia ago, 1900 B.C.

Logo 2023-04-27 The Washington Post

This is all wrong. Dracula is not about escaping from toxic relationships and healing through self-care and affirmations. It is a dark, chilling tale of blood and sex and power, or at least that is what the Hollywood rendering of the story has been. Dracula is a nobleman predator whose aberrant appetites terrify us even as we draw nearer for a closer look. We do so because the Dracula story is about the two subjects that discomfit and compel us most, sex and death. Dracula is a true antichrist, offering us eternal living-death in exchange for sin.

Logo 2023-04-28 The Spectator