“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”

- Damon Runyon

A jeremiad is a tale of woe, a lamentation, a doleful complaint, a plea for compassion, deriving its name from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the Old Testament prophet of the sixth and seventh centuries B.C. A book of the Bible attributed to him bears his name. He called for moral reform, threatening doom if his message went unheeded. It is the prediction of doom and disaster that we associate with his name. "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!...She weepeth sore in the night...all her friends...are become her enemies...Jerusalem hath greviously sinned...The joy of our heart is ceased...O Lord...wherefore dost thou...forsakes us...thou art very wroth against us." Thus spake Jeremiah; but how very boring it can be to be forced to listen to the jeremiads of one's trouble-prone acquaintances! Jeremiah is a name given to any person who takes a gloomy view of his times and denounces what is going on in the world.

This was the title, in ancient Rome, of a lower order of priests who prophesied by examining the entrails of animals killed in sacrifice. The custom was handed down by the Etruscans. The practice is known as haruspication (hair us puh KAY shun) or haruspicy (huh RUS puh see). The verb is haruspicate (huh RUS puh kate). Haruspex is a Latin word, base on Etruscan haru, Latin hira (entrail) plus specere (to look at: spexi means "I have inspected'). The Roman Censor (a government official) Cato (234-149 B.C.) was not impressed by this type of divination. He said: "I wonder how one haruspex can keep from laughing when he sees another." This made him very unpopular with haruspices.

Anyone or anything described as gargantuan is huge, gigantic, vast, or of enormous proportions. The adjective, often capitalized, is derived from Gargantua, the amiable giant king whose exploits are recorded in the novel of that name, one of the two great satirical works by Francois Rabelais (1494-1553). His books, full of coarse, broad, boisterous wit and humor, are characterized by the type of licentious language associated with the adjective Rabelaisian. Gargantua was noted for his incredibly voracious appetite (garganta is Spanish for “gullet”; cf. French gargoille, throat, and English derivatives gargle and gargoyle), so great that on one occasion the insatiable guzzler swallowed whole five pilgrims – with their staves! – mixed in a salad. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (Act III, Scene 2), Rosalind asks Celia a torrent of questions about Orlando and winds up: “Answer me in one word.” Celia replies: “You must borrow me* Gargantua’s mouth first: ‘tis a word too great for any mouth of this age’s size…” One can speak of the gargantuan appetite of a trencherman, the gargantuan length of one of those endless historical novels, or the gargantuan task of cleaning up after a hurricane.