What's the difference between ballad and dirge?

Ballad


Definition:

  • (n.) A popular kind of narrative poem, adapted for recitation or singing; as, the ballad of Chevy Chase; esp., a sentimental or romantic poem in short stanzas.
  • (v. i.) To make or sing ballads.
  • (v. t.) To make mention of in ballads.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "Celtic fans still regularly belt out The Ballad of Willie Maley," writes Mark Sheffield.
  • (2) His father, who was fond of humming the popular ballad Keep Right on to the End of the Road, lost his job in the great depression of the early 1930s.
  • (3) The band wanted to talk about their adventurous musical policy more than their lyrics (they mix brassy banda styles with accordion-based norteno ballads) but agreed that narcocorrido was crucial for their success.
  • (4) On at least one occasion he was persuaded to pick up a gusle , the single-stringed fiddle of the region, and perform an epic Serb ballad under a framed portrait of himself at the height of his power.
  • (5) "I feel like I could bring out a ballad next or I could bring out a techno song.
  • (6) Leaving a Murdoch-dominated media landscape with shows where, each week, shrieking irradiated cannibals sing power ballads as they compete for the right to die?
  • (7) After The Ballad was published in 1986, I spent two years in my room.
  • (8) Instead, Miliband's choices were often full of personal meaning, such as Paul Robeson's rendition of leftwing anthem The Ballad of Joe Hill, which he selected in memory of his father Ralph.
  • (9) I popped in for a nightcap but end up staying for two hours, serenaded by locals murdering everything from Japanese power ballads to cheesy Brazilian pop and Bohemian Rhapsody.
  • (10) Polydor signed her in 2009 and she might easily have released a debut album of unadorned guitar ballads, the sort of stuff she'd been touring around London pubs and bars.
  • (11) Rock's lingua franca remains the post-Oasis, post-Radiohead big stadium ballad, replete with keep-your-chin-up lyrics, usually suggesting you "hold on".
  • (12) Yet one one of the most moving moments of the night came when the choir from Parrs Wood High School in south Manchester duetted with Grande on her ballad, My Everything .
  • (13) His dad had liked Paul Robeson, hence Ballad of Joe Hill; the South African national anthem reminded him of an inspiring South Africanhe had known who was murdered by the secret police.
  • (14) The norteño band Los Tigres del Norte cancelled a planned appearance at an awards ceremony at a government-owned auditorium in October after organisers allegedly asked them not to perform a drug ballad.
  • (15) Jon Morter, 35, a part-time rock DJ and logistics expert from South Woodham Ferrers, near Chelmsford, decided it would be a bit of a giggle to start a campaign to encourage people to buy a record with pretty much the opposite vibe to the X Factor winner's ballad.
  • (16) It also inspired a Johnny Cash hit, The Ballad of Ira Hayes, with lyrics touching on a bitter legacy that is the source of many of the reservation’s problems to this day: The water grew Ira’s people’s crops ’Til the white man stole the water rights And the sparklin’ water stopped.
  • (17) Despite the jail's grim exterior, the regime is fairly liberal and inmates earn extra cash by selling food, handicrafts - and drug ballads.
  • (18) The trailer is book-ended by Tyson quoting Oscar Wilde's The Ballad Of Reading Gaol: Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!
  • (19) Official Charts Company data shows Noel Gallagher’s band High Flying Birds had both the best-selling vinyl single and album in the first three months of the year, with Ballad Of The Mighty I and Chasing Yesterday , respectively.
  • (20) After university in Cambridge, he toured revolutionary Europe and then set up home briefly in the West Country with his sister Dorothy, where he met Coleridge, his collaborator on their early popular volume, the Lyrical Ballads .

Dirge


Definition:

  • (a.) A piece of music of a mournful character, to accompany funeral rites; a funeral hymn.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) His wink-wink, nod-nod racist slogan, “Make America great again,” together with his apocalyptic dirge of a convention, left exposed and unguarded a flank that is usually the Republicans’ specialty.
  • (2) In some establishments, mournful dirges played while coffins were carried through the crowds of drinkers; in others, the walls were hung with black crepe.
  • (3) The band appear to be playing several verses of the English dirge.
  • (4) There is, it seems, a political divide in CBeebies appreciation, judging by a recent Spectator article entitled “ Agitprop for Toddlers ” in which the author compared a wildlife programme on the channel, in which “a rainbow nation of children [march] around the British countryside singing ‘Let’s make sure we recycle every day’”, to “one of those Dear Leader dirges you see in North Korea”.
  • (5) As Claudius said in Hamlet: “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage.” Weddings, to me, feel heavy with expectation, pregnant with emotion, saturated with hope, fear and hard-to-keep promises.
  • (6) This dirge of a ballad is performed by a woman whose facial expression befits someone burying their pet dog.
  • (7) Due to an editing error, the quote, “With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage”, was misattributed to Hamlet.
  • (8) The dirge can be kept for British sport such as the Olympics, Andy Murray doing well and the ones where you sit down."
  • (9) Such legislation would be a royal pain the arse in the UK, our dirge leading to a spike in suicide rates around tea-time.
  • (10) Today I see England as a continuum, with football yobs at one end and Eton yobs at the other, and Morrissey dirging about lost seaside resorts somewhere in the middle.
  • (11) "That is the mother of all dirges, but I'm not too keen on Flower of Scotland either.
  • (12) Across the internet, thousands of music fans looking for Thicke's raunchy, cowbell-stoked summer jam stumbled instead on a recording of Beckwith's sombre dirge , released on the 2010 CD Jalsaghar .
  • (13) The Danish one is a bit of a dirge and should really only be used as the closing credits of a lunchtime documentary on some shortwave radio station.
  • (14) FIFA games aren’t exactly known for hilarity, so these shows are a very welcome change of tone from the brain-breaking Europop dirge found in EA’s club football game year after year.
  • (15) Japan's is bloody miserable, to tell the truth, the sort of dirge you'd expect to hear pinging off the walls of a church in the Outer Hebridies.
  • (16) These are the poems: "Burbank," "Gerontion," "Sweeney Among the Nightingales," "A Cooking Egg," and the posthumously published "Dirge".
  • (17) BECAUSE WHEN PEOPLE HEAR THE CAN-DO OPTIMISM OF THE YES CAMPAIGN UP AGAINST THE CAN’T-DO DIRGE OF THE NO CAMPAIGN THEN THEY CHOOSE YES.
  • (18) A Hague speech became a Foreign Office dirge, awash in wars on terror, wars on want, wars on rape and a world of “unacceptable” regimes.
  • (19) 9.49pm GMT “Six priests wailed an a cappella dirge as the open funeral casket was carried through the assembled throng and brought to the stage at Independence Square,” begins Shaun Walker’s (@ ShaunWalker7 ) dispatch from Kiev today: The body, wrapped in a white cloth with just the head visible, was that of just one of at least 77 people to have died this week in Kiev, but its arrival pricked thousands of eyes with tears, as the huge crowds that had gathered bowed their heads in prayer.
  • (20) There are certainly a good many less dirge-like than ours.