English tends to have plenty of extra words and phrases for common things. There are loads of synonyms for “money”, for example, and money is certainly something commonplace. Something else you’re likely to encounter repeatedly — sometimes even in the course of a single day — is scolding. Or, if you prefer, rebuking, criticizing, giving a piece of your mind. If those aren’t enough, you could choose among any of these: excoriate, chastise, denounce, blame, castigate, reprimand, chide…believe me, the list goes on and on. People are unlikely to do the right thing all the time, but everybody else is quite likely to take them to task over it.
Not that we need yet another way to talk about finding fault, but there’s a pretty good one that has faded into rarity lately. Its first appearance was in a letter from 1687 that was published in the book Remains in 1865: “I had far rather venture to be liable to a jobation for not having done my part.” “Jobation” is the key word here. It’s a rebuke, and particularly a very long and tedious one. A harangue, in other words (and as we’ve already established, there are plenty of “other words”).
“Jobation” has been used as recently as the 1990s, in Classical Review: “Though it was a volume which I edited that provoked his jobation, I share his doubts.” But even then it was quite rare. It’s more common in England than the US, or at least it was. It’s a form of the even more obscure verb “to job.” That one also dates back to the 1600s, and there’s an entry in John Ray’s Collection of English Proverbs from 1670 that suggests it might have originated as a slang term among college students: “In the University of Cambridge, the young scholars are wont to call chiding Jobing.”
“Jobing,” in turn, seems to be based on the Old Testament, in which a character named Job was subjected to long reproofs delivered by his friends (or, quite possibly, “friends”). A new word might have been needed in the 1600s because those diatribes, being addressed directly to Job, would not at the time qualified as “harangues.” When “harangue” appeared in the 1400s in Scotland, it meant a tirade delivered to a crowd. It was a loud, ranting speech, that is, and when the word migrated to England in the 1600s it kept that meaning. Andrew Duncan’s 1595 reference book (very long 16th-century-style title; just call it the Appendix Etymologiae) explained it thusly: “A harang, speeche.”
Over the interceding centuries since then, speeches themselves have been greatly affected by technological progress, and those changes have in turn affected “harangue.” Where originally you’d have to round up a gang of layabouts with nothing better to do in order to organize a proper harangue, in various eras you’d be able to drive around the city in a car with loudspeakers on the roof, your ranting amplified enough that everybody within three blocks could hear you. Then you might sit in a room by yourself and rave at a microphone, and your bombastic orations would be picked up (you hoped) by radios in countless living rooms. More recently, all you need to do is sit in the dark in front of a screen and keyboard (or webcam, if that’s more your style), and fustianize your heart out.
You might notice that the trend in this technological cavalcade of ostensible progress is that the original requirement — finding a bunch of toadies to stand still for a while and appear to listen — has steadily shrunk, eventually resulting in just this: all you need for a suitable harangue is some gadgetry and a convenient disobliger, galler, fretter, or botheration. Which, by the way, serves to reinforce the point we started with, that commonplace things and events tend to accumulate a plethora of English terms. What a nuisance; somebody deserves a thorough fustigation.
