General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Nobody Wins the Nobel Peace Prize [View all]NNadir
(36,737 posts)...and he "won" the Nobel Prize by stepping outside being a stickler for language.
Personally I often reflect that great literature often offers deliberate ambiguity.
There is a certain passage in Hermann Hesse's Demian that I struggled many years to translate into English. It cannot be effectively translated, I decided, because of its ambiguity. I thus chose language that reflected what it meant to me, what I think it means, as opposed to what Hesse may have wanted to express.
To my mind ambiguity is a cause for thinking more profoundly about a work. To my mind the greatest line that Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote, the sentence, "Listen.," is powerful for both being as succinct and as ambiguous as is possible. (To my mind "Slaughterhouse Five" was a Nobel worthy work, either for literature or peace, but nobody's interested in what I think.)
I don't believe there is much confusion about describing the Nobel Prize as being "won."
There are certainly disputes about people who should have been awarded the Nobel Prize but weren't, but a linguistic punctilio about how to describe an awardee or Laureate or winner is of less profound importance.
The Nobel Committes are composed of human beings and are hardly infallible or even just. That Lise Meitner wasn't awarded one reflects as much, as is the more widely acknowledged case of Rosalind Franklin. These decisions call into question the value of the Prize, but I think we can all agree that awarding one to the orange pedophile felon would have been fatal to what the Prize was supposed to evoke.
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