jeremiad
IPA: dʒɛrʌmˈaɪʌd
noun
- A long speech or prose work that bitterly laments the state of society and its morals, and often contains a prophecy of its coming downfall.
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Examples of "jeremiad" in Sentences
- "The Great Gatsby" is a kind of jeremiad (as any student of Bercovitch's will tell you).
- The expectation of jeremiad is so deeply ingrained in Americans’ political consciousness that it might seem to be universal.
- America has a grand tradition of the "jeremiad," a form named after the prophet Jeremiah who was sent to tell a nation to repent before it was too late.
- In 1980, George W.S. Trow, a veteran New Yorker staff writer and one of the founding editors of The National Lampoon, published a 25,000-word jeremiad decrying the evils of television.
- Who says calling up the local hub and filling up the whole fifteen-minute block of the operator's voicemail with a howling spoken word jeremiad about FRAUD and LIES doesn't get you anywhere?
- Keillor’s jeremiad is wrong on so many levels, and proceeds from a place of such monumental self-regard and fundamental misinformation, that a proper rebuttal would require an entire afternoon and a minimum of ten double-spaced pages.
- It helpfully reasserts the book's argument; and by its resort to invective — "jeremiad," "screeds," "emotionally gratifying," "capitalist hobgoblins," etc. — his letter offers an instructive insight into Reich's own thought processes.
- The New Yorker today is just as willing to publish a barely illustrated, three-part, 30,000-word jeremiad on climate change as founding editor Harold Ross was happy to devote an entire issue to one article on the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.
- The whole of the first act consists of one emphatic jeremiad by Cicero, about the desperate condition of Rome as it then was, its factiousness, its servility, -- a jeremiad which is continued at the end of the act, by the chorus, in rhymed stanzas.
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