English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Thirty-odd years after demobilization, there are many former other ranks who enjoy a dream of avenging old insults, injustices, nuances of upper-class disdain.
- 1985 by Anthony Burgess.
I don't know the meaning of the work "nuance" in this text. I have two versions:
1 - "Other ranks" dreamed of avenging two things - Insults and injustices. And these are nuances of upper-class disdain.
2 - "Other ranks" dreamed of avenging three things - Insults, injustices and nuances.
This is very ambiguous.
Your second version is more probably correct. We can interpret the sentence as saying that the former other ranks are dreaming of avenging three things: old insults, injustices, and nuances of upper-class disdain.
The difficulty of parsing this sentence is due to the third indirect object—"nuances of upper-class disdain"—having been left dangling, without the conjunction "and" to bind it with the other two indirect objects.
The use of "and" would have made the sentence's meaning more clear:
Thirty-odd years after demobilization, there are many former other ranks who enjoy a dream of avenging old insults, injustices, and nuances of upper-class disdain.
It is also possible that your first version is correct, but that is putting a greater strain on the construction of the sentence. If the intended meaning is closer to your first version, then some simple punctuation would have made the meaning clear:
Thirty-odd years after demobilization, there are many former other ranks who enjoy a dream of avenging old insults, injustices—nuances of upper-class disdain.
nuances in this context means "subtle variations". The author was likely looking for a more elegant way to describe "acts" or "expressions" (of upper-class disdain).
