WORD LISTS"A Quilt of a Country," Vocabulary from the essayThu Oct 03 13:29:55 EDT 2019
Anna Quindlen looks back at America's past as a country of immigrants in order to understand our present experience as a cultural patchwork of ethnicities and religions. Following the tragic events of 9/11, this essay seeks to rally the United States under one banner of multiculturalism and tolerance.
  
disparate
"Disparate" is used to describe the different parts, while "mongrel" is used to describe the whole, but both adjectives describe America in a seemingly negative tone: "disparate" focuses on separation, and "mongrel" is a term for a mixed breed that is often seen as inferior.
A mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone.
discordant
This example sentence describes America in a more positive tone. The verb "seem" softens the adjectives "discordant" and "crazy." The comparison to a quilt not only connects to "great folk-art forms" but also to a feeling of cozy protection.
That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades.
tolerance
As the structure of the example sentence suggests, "pluralism" ("a social organization in which diversity is tolerated") and "tolerance" should be directly related, but instead, the opposite attitude of bigotry fills our news and history books.
Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry.
ostracism
Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other.
conundrum
This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism."
apartheid
Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity.
hostility
The adjective "interwoven" (past tense of "interweave" and synonymous with "intermixed") continues the image of America as a quilt. But the noun "hostility" makes the quilt seem like it's suffocating the people it covers.
Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.
overwhelm
"Overwhelm" also means "overcome by superior force"--both definitions fit, because here, the verb connects to possible changes in the written symbols of identity, while other sentences in the essay argue that excessively identifying with an ethnic group can often lead to physical violence with others.
With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen--African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American--would overwhelm the right.
devastation
Terrorism has led to devastation--and unity.
vex
One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country's Chester Avenues.
abet
Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity.
coalesce
There is that Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing.
grudging
And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents.
breadth
But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name.
improbable
Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder.
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