While we're ruing literary movements, please hear my mournful lament --

Is it too late to squash this whole 'jeremiad' trend? I've gone through pretty much my whole life without hearing or needing this word, and in the past week I've read it at least three times already. Perhaps the writers could just get little 80s rock band type glossy buttons to wear around that say 'jeremiad,' thus proving how goddamned literate they are without the rest of us having to watch them crowbar it into an article about Janet Jackson's boob.

It's a fine word with, I'm sure, an honorable or perhaps even colorful history. I'd happily read it about once every ten or eleven months, but I guess that's just not how 60 cent words travel in this day and age.

Goo goo ga joob, or whatever.

Are they kidding? Man, who doesn't love the "poem as lovely as a tree" guy?

Scott -- wow, that was quite a j . . . um, plaint.

Had a bit of a giggle at this. I was in Ireland last July, taking a 3 week drive around the country, which I heartily recommend. Feeling all inspired after visiting the Irish Writer's museum, I picked up a copy of "Ulysses".

Let me say that 7 months after the fact, I am still about halfway through it. I still read it, it has fallen down the priority of lists of book to read. I have found it a difficult read, but I do want to finish it.

I should add that my two previous literary "failures" were "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and the "Naked Lunch". "The Hunchback" had a style which I found exceedingly tedious, resulting in me putting it down after a few chapters. I must say that I was 15 at the time, but it still counts.

"The Naked Lunch" I put down almost immediately. Good God, I found the book almost impossible to comprehend. I was 22 at the time, and I fear that I'd approach the text in the same way now.

Cheers,
Garthmeister J.

Every blooming day, a yawning pickled haerring lounges coyly on an unbleached ruddy doyley in the center of the boneyard, seducing a daily peck from the sly burnt lips of the nearest nearsighted candlemaker.

Has this jeremiad word been in semi-common usage and I've only recently become sensitized? And everyone's wondering why I suddenly have this vocab-induced hair across my portal?

In the last week, I've seen it used in the Post's review of Randall Robinson's "Quitting America" and the Onion AV Club's of the latest Le Carre. And a couple of other places I haven't been able to track, besides. Some searching reveals that the Onion has also used it in reviews of Busta Rhymes and Phillip Roth. Actually, on the Onion, there's one Nathan Rabin who is a serial jeremiad offender, who used it in three separate reviews on April 19, 2002. And thus won a bet, I hope.

There is a band called Jeremiad, of course, though surprisingly it isn't Pearl Jam.