WordWatch: Jeremiah

If someone accuses you of being ‘a real Jeremiah’, what are they saying about you? Is it a compliment or an insult? Last year, Anu Garg had a go at offering a definition. For the uninitiated (i.e. the non-word-obsessives), Anu is the Indian-born, American computer and word geek who runs ‘A Word a Day’ (http://wordsmith.org/awad), a free daily email newsletter with 600,000 subscribers in 200 countries. What did he make of ‘Jeremiah’? Here’s his explanation:

jeremiah (jer-uh-MY-uh) noun A person who complains continually, has a gloomy attitude, or one who warns about a disastrous future.[1. http://wordsmith.org/words/jeremiah.html] 

Is this reasonable? Or is it unfair to poor old Jeremiah? Mind you, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2005) is even tougher on the prophet: it says that a Jeremiah is “a pessimistic person, who always says that bad things are going to happen”.[2. http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/Jeremiah] And the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed., 1989) makes Jeremiah sound like the sort of person an Aussie would call a whinger: “a person given to lamentation or woeful complaining”. The reality is that to be a ‘Jeremiah’ is to be something much tougher and nobler than these belittling definitions suggest. Jeremiah’s story runs from the 13th year of King Josiah (around 626 bc) to the fall of Jerusalem in 587 bc. He lived in a time of moral degeneracy, foolish leaders, cultural corruption, general uncertainty and instability (sound familiar?). Against this background, he delivered a negative message for a positive purpose. My battered old copy of the New Bible Dictionary (1962) says that Jeremiah “was at once gentle and tenacious, affectionate and inflexible … He unmasked the nation’s sins and broadcast its judgment …”. And that’s the point: it’s both cowardly and dishonest to fail to declare God’s judgement to people who face that judgement. As Broughton Knox points out, in the gospel message “[w]e preach judgement”.[3. D Broughton Knox, Selected Works, Volume 1: The Doctrine of God, Matthias Media, Sydney, p. 189.] This means that sometimes it’s not enough to simply tell the truth; sometimes it’s also necessary to point to a dangerous falsehood, and say “And that’s a lie!” That’s a much tougher (and nobler) task than just being a gloomy, pessimistic whinger who “complains continually”. So if someone calls you a ‘Jeremiah’, is it a compliment? Well, if it’s someone who knows their Bible, yes it is.