Blog entry #38
Jubilee | Juxtapose
Jubilee
When you hear this word, you think of celebration. Silver jubilee birthday, golden jubilee anniversary. I read this word, I think two things. One, it puts me in a celebratory mood because someone has achieved a milestone of either 25 or 50 years of something - wow! Two, it reminds of the posh upstate in Hyderabad, because it's named Jubilee Hills. Only recently did I learn that Jubilee is an English variation of the Hebrew word 'jobel', which means "ram's horn." This curved horn was used as a trumpet to signal the year of the Jubilee. Every 50 years, the House of Israel would celebrate the Jubilee year, which The Bible mentions as a year of rest, forgiveness of all debts, and the liberation of slaves to their native lands.
Juxtapose
Yet another fun word to say! This word implies the idea of placing two things side by side, for the purpose of comparison or contrast. Learning the various examples of juxtaposition was a fun activity to do as part of a school assignment. Instead of finding commonplace examples, we had to search for idioms that contained juxtaposed elements, and examples from Literature. Here are some I found for my assignment:
Idioms: When it rains, it pours; Better late than never; Making a mountain out of a molehill.
Examples from Literature:
A Tale of Two Cities: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness..."
Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
And my favourite example and poem: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference."
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