Meaning of carnival | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Any of a number of festivals held just before the beginning of Lent.
2. The season just before the beginning of the Western Christian season of Lent.
3. carnival (festival held just before Lent)
4. A festive occasion marked by parades and sometimes special foods and other entertainment.
5. A traveling amusement park, called a funfair in British English.
   US
6. A context in which transgression or inversion of the social order is given temporary license. Derived from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin.
7. A gaudily chaotic situation.
   figuratively

Equivalents

Examples

“Carnival of Brazil”

“Venice Carnival”

“Like most human activities, ballooning has sponsored heroes and hucksters and a good deal in between. For every dedicated scientist patiently recording atmospheric pressure and wind speed while shivering at high altitudes, there is a carnival barker with a bevy of pretty girls willing to dangle from a basket or parachute down to earth.”

“We all got to ride the merry-go-round when they brought their carnival to town.”

“When the carnival came to town, every one wanted some cotton candy.”

“The social environment contains the ambiguous traces of carnival: it resists the ideology of capitalism and, at the same time, reproduces the capitalist social order.”

“a carnival of idiocy”

“To the statement above we may, of course, add that a far greater number have never had the “luck” of seeing a Continental Fair;— the Carnivals of Italy, of France,—a Russian Fair,—or the Carnivals and Jahrmarkts of Germany.”

CEFR level