jeremiad

See also: jeremiád

English

WOTD – 29 January 2008

Etymology

From French jérémiade, from Jérémie, from Latin Ieremias, from Hebrew ירמיה‎ (yirm'yá, “Jeremiah”). Named after biblical prophet Jeremiah, who lamented the moral state of Judah and predicted her downfall.

Pronunciation

(Received Pronunciation, US) IPA^(key): /ˌd͡ʒɛɹ.əˈmaɪ.əd/
Audio (US) (file)
Rhymes: -aɪəd

Noun

jeremiad (plural jeremiads)

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.
Synonyms: lament, lamentation, tirade; see also Thesaurus:diatribe
- 1895 — Mary Gaunt, The Moving Finger, A Digger's Christmas
  "Father Maguire," he said in the broadest of Cork brogues, without the ghost of a smile on his grave Irish face, "is it a song yez wantin'? Well, thin, it's just a jeremiad I 'd be singin' yez, an' not another song at all, at all."
- 2006: The Columbus Dispatch, May 5
  “This is precisely the manner of Balkanization that Schlesinger cautioned us about in his prescient jeremiad on multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America.”
- 2007, The Guardian,
  Cannes is smacking its lips in anticipation of filmmaker and provocateur Michael Moore's latest jeremiad against the US administration, which receives its premiere at the film festival today.
- 2015 March 30, Michael Billington, “Look Back in Anger: how John Osborne liberated theatrical language”, in The Guardian‎:
  What few of us realised at the time was that Osborne, while endorsing most of Jimmy’s jeremiads, also had a sneaking sympathy for his father-in-law, Colonel Redfern, an upper-class relic of the Raj.

Translations

long speech or prose work