Definition:
A litany of abuse--a series of critical epithets, descriptions, or attributes. A type of invective.
See also: Bdelygmia: The Perfect Rant.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "nausea, abuse"Examples:
- "A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."
(King James I, "Counterblast to Tobacco") - "There is not a more mean, stupid, dastardly, pitiful, selfish, spiteful, envious, ungrateful animal than the Public."
(William Hazlitt) - "A vile beastly rottenheaded foolbegotten brazenthroated pernicious piggish screaming, tearing, roaring, perplexing, splitmecrackle crashmecriggle insane ass of a woman is practicing howling below-stairs with a brute of a singingmaster so horribly, that my head is nearly off."
(Edward Lear, Letter to Lady Strachey, 1859) - "[T]he American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and . . . they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day."
(H. L. Mencken, "On Being an American") - "The Republicans are not stupid. They tagged the liberals as 'latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, school-busing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists,' as commentator Jason Epstein described it, soft on communism, soft on crime, opposed to capital punishment, and soft on the new war on terrorism."
(Mort Zuckerman, U.S. News, 6 June 2005) - "Well, I've got a staff meeting to go to and so do you, you elitist, Harvard, fascist, missed-the-dean's-list-two-semesters-in-a-row Yankee jackass."
(Allison Janney as CJ Cregg in The West Wing)
Pronunciation: de-LIG-me-uh
Also Known As: abominatio
