Word: jeremiads
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...their unique--and often contagious--standards. The sage of the tax revolt, touchstone of the most important social and economic movement of our era, seemed to emerge half from central casting and half from the Bible--the prophet come to save a nation, live and in color. His Jeremiad condemned demon government and its lecherous grope for the tax dollar; the reverberations of Howard Jarvis's leap in the dark still echo today, as his spiritual brethren control the White House, the Senate, and apparently, the national conscience...
...Kimmer (Louis Zorich), into buying his unwritten cornpone saga of the "true West." Saul is one of those monstrous Hollywood moths who skirt the flames of venality, yet never get torched. All three men are the progeny of Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, that emetically funny moral jeremiad hurled with lethal precision at the cynic American psyche...
...perhaps in the age when the John Simon-William Safire-Edwin Newman-style of linguistic Jeremiad is so fashionable in the United States, Americans can draw a little satisfaction from the Oxford dons' attentions. Of course, the Oxford Press embarked on this enterprise because there was money to be made, but the publication of the OAD does give final legitimacy to a language now even more vital and alive than the mother tongue. American English deserves celebration. Oxford, citadel of the Old World, has finally made peace with the new; the phonies probably never will...