THE HINDU Editorial Vocabulary- October 14, 2016- Topic 2
Over the last century, the Nobel Prize in Literature has sprung its fair share of surprises. In 1950, for
instance, the prize went to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who quickly
followed this up with two books of awkward and astoundingly pedestrian short
stories, written and published almost as if they were intended to justify the
award. The trend has since persisted, with the Swedish Academy picking writers
across genres and geographies. They include Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer in 2011, the oft-banned Chinese Mo Yan in 2012, Canadian
short story writer Alice Munro in 2013, French novelist Patrick Modiano in 2014 and Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, who has mined oral histories extensively for her
non-fiction work on life in the Soviet Union, last year. Singer-songwriter Bob
Dylan, a long shot in the Nobel sweepstakes for years, is this year’s
delightfully idiosyncratic choice, for “having created new poetic expressions
within the great American song tradition”.
While the purists might be aghast, what
possibly clinched it for the 75-year-old is that he isn’t just another musician
with a five-decades-plus career. His lyrics — almost bordering on the
philosophical when he asks some weighty questions about peace and war in his
1962 hit, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — chronicled Sixties America’s angst, marking
him out as a counterculture icon although Dylan himself would later deny having
lent his voice to a generation. Like his contemporary Leonard Cohen, Dylan also
wrote in a manner that made listeners, almost contradictorily, both engage and
distance themselves from the music. In his hands the music and the lyrics
merged and separated, urging us to respond to his songwriting as melody and
rhythm, at one level, and as sheer poetry at another. His role as an
influential modern ‘English poet’ has been underrated, despite his profoundly
personal odes about war, peace, love and closure. So has been his contribution
to the evolution of modern music forms — few, for instance, would trace rap
music’s seeds in Dylan’s 51-year-old classic advisory for young adults,
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. With every passing decade, he has reinvented
himself with a unique ability to stir hope in listeners even while plumbing the
depths of darkness in his themes. If Dylan’s body of work were to be compared
to any one piece of art, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica perhaps comes
closest. Like the beam of sunlight on a solitary flower in a slain soldier’s
hands in the depressing scene of the Spanish town destroyed by war, Dylan still
brings hope in a world going increasingly awry. And that’s worth a Nobel.
Vocabulary
Sprung: Move or jump suddenly or rapidly upward or forward.
Example: I sprang out of bed
Synonyms: leap, jump, bound, vault, hop; appear
suddenly, appear unexpectedly
Awkward: causing difficulty; hard to do or deal with.
Example: One of the most awkward jobs is painting a ceiling
Synonyms: difficult, tricky, cumbersome, unwieldy; inconvenient, inappropriate
Persisted: continue firmly or obstinately in an opinion or a course of action in spite
of difficulty, opposition, or failure.
Example: The minority of drivers who persist in drinking
Sweepstakes: a form of gambling, especially on horse races, in which all the stakes are
divided among the winners.
Example: A sweepstakes ticket
Idiosyncratic: of or relating to idiosyncrasy; peculiar or individual.
Example: She emerged as one of the great idiosyncratic talents of the Nineties
Synonyms: distinctive, individual, individualistic, characteristic, peculiar, typical
Purists: a person who insists on absolute adherence to traditional rules or
structures, especially in language or style.
Example: Chai's dish of choice is far from traditional, but he insists that purists
are missing out.
Synonyms: pedant, perfectionist, formalist, literalist, stickler, traditionalist, doctrinaire
Aghast: filled with horror or shock.
Example: When the news came out they were aghast
Synonyms: horrified, appalled, dismayed, thunderstruck, stunned, shocked
Counterculture: a way of life and set of attitudes opposed to or at variance with the
prevailing social norm.
Example: The idealists of the 60s counterculture
Sheer: nothing other than; unmitigated (used for emphasis).
Example: She giggled with sheer delight
Synonyms: utter, complete, absolute, total, pure, downright, out-and-out
Subterranean: existing, occurring, or done under the earth's surface.
Example: This three-dimensional complex of surface closed depressions, subterranean
conduits, caves, and springs is known as karst terrain.
Plumbing: the system of pipes, tanks, fittings, and other apparatus required for the
water supply, heating, and sanitation in a building.
Example: There was no kitchen or bathroom, no plumbing or central heating
Solitary: done or existing alone.
Example: I live a pretty solitary life
Synonyms: lonely, companionless, unaccompanied, by oneself, on
one's own, alone
Awry: away from the appropriate, planned, or expected course; amiss.
Example: Many youthful romances go awry
Synonyms: amiss, wrong, up