It's Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for August 24th.
Today's word is Jeremiah, spelled J-E-R-E-M-I-A-D.
Jeremiah is a noun.
It refers to a long, cautionary, or angry rant about something.
It can also refer to a similarly prolonged lamentation or expression of great sorrow or deep sadness.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The Washington Post by Philip Kennecott.
One of the most exciting exhibitions now on view is Josh Klein's Project for a New American Century at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Klein uses video sculpture and installation to explore the social,
political, and environmental crises we are facing.
But Klein's work transcends the Jeremiahad and grapples with the persistence of beauty as a basic adaptive tool.
And unlike any other artist I've encountered recently,
he works simultaneously in the utopian and dystopian mode.
Jeremiah was a Jewish prophet who lived from about 650 to 570 BC and spent his days lambasting the Hebrews for their false worship and social injustice and denouncing the king for his selfishness,
materialism, and iniquities.
When not calling on his people to quit their wicked ways, he was lamenting his own lot.
A portion of the biblical book of Jeremiah is devoted to his confessions,
a series of lamentations on the hardships endured by a prophet with an unpopular message.
Nowadays,
English speakers use Jeremiah for a pessimistic person and Jeremiah for the way these Jeremiah's carry on.
The word Jeremiah was borrowed from the French who coined it as Gérée Meillard.