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Wednesday January 20, 2010

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diatribe [DAHY-uh-trahyb]

noun

1. A bitter, abusive verbal attack or speech.

• Although promoted under the slogan "fair and balanced", Fox News horrifies political moderates with the hectoring rhetoric of its prime-time evening anchors. One man in particular, Glenn Beck, raises liberal hackles with his furious diatribes against Obama.
  Andrew Clark, "International: Media: Fox hunt: cracks in Murdoch dynasty as TV news chief finds himself in firing line", The Guardian, Jan 16, 2010
• There are indications that Ms. Lee is a serious student of the original play. (She was working on her thesis on "King Lear" when she dropped out of the doctoral program in English at the University of California, Berkeley.) The grotesquely violent diatribes that the characters sometimes hurl at each other parody the vicious language Lear heaps on his ungrateful daughters, for instance.
  Charles Isherwood, "Blow, Winds! Deconstruct Thy Text!", New York Times, Jan 15, 2010
• Jack retired to his seat, and for the next ten minutes indulged in a diatribe against classical learning in general, and hexameters and pentameters in particular.
  G. A. Henty (1832 - 1902) A prolific English novelist. Jack Archer, A Tale of the Crimea (1883)

Origin of the Word

Diatribe, approximately 1580, derives from Latin diatriba "learned discussion," from Greek diatribe "discourse, study," literally "a wearing away (of time)," from dia- "away" + tribein "to wear, rub."