Definition

Not in harmony or keeping with the surroundings or other aspects of something.

Pronunciation

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UK English


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Excerpts from News Articles

And you can only reach its most remote, beautifully frozen parts from the water. Don’t miss Deception Island, an incongruous volcanic speck where you can bathe in hot springs. Most trips run between November and April, and while you can fly to King George Island, you’ll need to board an ice-strengthened ship or a smaller Zodiac in order to get up close and personal with this extraordinary landscape.

Logo 2022-08-24 The Independent

Laughter, like humor, typically sparks from recognizing the incongruities or absurdities of a situation. You need to mentally resolve the surprising behavior or event — otherwise you won’t laugh; you might just be confused instead. Inferring the intentions of others and taking their perspective can enhance the intensity of the laughter and amusement you feel.

Logo 2023-04-01 CNN News

In the UK, magic mushrooms are still categorised as class A drugs, incongruously rubbing shoulders with extremely harmful substances such as crack cocaine and heroin. As such, possession alone can carry a prison sentence of up to seven years. To acquire them for legitimate research purposes is an expensive and heavily bureaucratic process.

Logo 2023-04-10 The Guardian

The Reddit commentator mentioned above described clause 4.3.1 as “completely incongruous with reality,” noting that it appears to prohibit library names including “intellij-rust, rust-rocksdb, Steven Fackler’s openssl-rust and rust-postgres, rust-libp2p, Stepan Koltsov’s rust-protobuf, and probably dozens of other serious and well-respected projects.”

Logo 2023-04-11 The Register

When a journalist went undercover as a footman in Buckingham Palace, he discovered that the Queen stored her breakfast cereals in Tupperware, and that was the splash. It wasn’t unlike Wood’s paradox – on the one hand, how incredibly incongruous to have everyday and readily available plastic nestled among all the silverware, but how on earth else do you keep your cornflakes fresh? She is only queen; she hasn’t got superpowers.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Guardian

The notion that the same person who passed a government security vetting could believe it was okay to trust anonymous online acquaintances with secret documents may seem incongruous , but those who study social attitudes among digital natives say the government’s need for airtight security and a young generation’s widespread embrace of online transparency have been on a collision course for years.

Logo 2023-04-15 The Washington Post

‘Pick your battles,” Sophie Morgan says, dressed all in black, looking incongruously gorgeous, like she belongs in a sonnet or a music video, not in the Guardian offices (no offence, colleagues). “Pick any battle.”

Logo 2023-04-19 The Guardian

Hattori’s death brought unprecedented international attention to the United States’ culture of gun violence. This was the killing of a well-liked foreign teenager, dressed incongruously in a white tuxedo to look like John Travolta, simply because he mistook one house for another. It shook the global understanding of U.S. gun deaths, which had simplistically been linked to gangs and crime in the minds of many foreigners.

Logo 2023-04-20 The Washington Post

The truth is that, despite all of his well-merited notoriety and a multiple murderer, Whitey himself remained a folk hero to many in his old South Boston stomping grounds. So perhaps the Charlotte MacLeod-Whitey Bulger connection is not so incongruous after all.

Logo 2023-04-20 Literary Hub

With lethal rudeness: “If you can’t laugh at yourself” – to Jeffrey Archer – “you might be missing the joke of the century.” Or with disarming incongruity . To Richard Gere and Lauren Bacall, on the Michael Aspel show to promote their new movies: “I must ask you about both of your films.

Logo 2023-04-22 The Guardian

It's a rare kernel that debuts without support for something incongruous , and this time around users of Logitech's G923 racing wheel controller will be pleased that Linux now supports their passion.

Logo 2023-04-24 The Register

A striker breaks free, in hopes of getting a pass or a center delivered by a teammate. But the ball is intercepted by a defender, or flies well past the striker, out of reach. The usual impetuousness of soccer players would logically inspire a gesture of annoyance, or at least a show of disappointment after that useless run. But strangely, the frustrated player then turns toward the bungling teammate and offers an incongruous thumbs up.

Logo 2023-04-24 Literary Hub

Hamilton suggested there is humor in the incongruity between the term and the men to whom “babygirl” is applied. He added that many of the men called “babygirl” look like they would take offense if they found out they were being called the term online.

Logo 2023-04-24 MSNBC News

‘May’ and ‘George’ are sentimental pen portraits of his mother (‘You gave life to 13 souls…’) and an institutionalised uncle respectively. These Who Do You Think You Are? vignettes vie with more incongruous fare. On ‘All You Need is Greed’, the man who sang ‘Merry Christmas Everyone’ in a sensible sweater sticks it to the evil bankers, while ‘Dirty Water’ is a fiery blues-rocker portraying – not altogether sympathetically – some poor whisky-sodden soul.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Spectator

There are many other photographs I might have chosen as my best, but I enjoy the incongruity of this one. The way the fingers seem to be interfering with overhead wires is also what makes it for me.

Logo 2023-04-26 The Guardian

As it happened, that year, 2005 , I had been invited to be a Man Booker judge, a little incongruously since, in my role then as Literary Editor at the London Evening Standard, rather than getting soundly behind all such trade promotions as I should have done, I had annually scoffed at its mishaps, mirthfully calling it a literary harvest festival and saying the judges were being asked to choose between an apple and orange and so forth. The Booker was then in its heyday of influence, not yet diffused by the decision to include American writers.

Logo 2023-04-26 Literary Hub

McDonald describes that the comedy of such an inversion “lies in the incongruity of the events, the reversal which creates the man’s passivity and the woman’s action, because, it is assumed, men are not passive, and women are not in charge.” In other words, such reversals can be played for their humor because they are not believed to be common. The joke lies in the swapping of normative gender behavior—such premises are only funny because the heterosexual script remains the presumed norm.

Logo 2023-04-27 Literary Hub

Chicken Shop Date thrives on incongruity : why would a celebrity meet some random girl for chips? Dimoldenberg started it as a column interviewing rappers in a youth club magazine and in 2014 pivoted to YouTube. “The dynamic is that no one really wanted to be there,” she says.

Logo 2023-04-29 The Guardian