I was reading my RSS feed and came across an article in The Hill (a neutral rated news outlet that is good for news titles). It said, in paragraph 3 or so, that “Trump lambasted Democrats on Twitter earlier Tuesday” That got me curious about lambasting.
Now, for my students, (look it up!) lambasting means to criticize strongly. (Dictionary.com has it as “criticize harshly”. Merriam Webster has it as “assault violently” or to “attack verbally”. Growing up in the age of Nixon, I got the impression that it was strong criticism with a note of sarcasm and an element of truth. Most of the lambasting going on then was directed toward the President who had to claim he was not a crook.
So I started to think. Which direction is the lambasting going these days? A search for trends does not yield any significant results. But a simple search for “Trump lambasted” gets 23,300 hits (using the incognito window, so it is not filtered for my previous searches). A search for “lambasted Trump” drew about half that, with 11,800 hits. Now searching inquiries to Google is not a great measure, it is pretty much all we have. (Any suggestions for other search engines?)
It might be the media, attributing a more violent verb to our current President who claims no collusion. Still trying to check out that avenue. Which leads me to wonder if the rest of us are being too nice. May I suggest we “politely” lambaste away? My other question was whether you can really lambaste by Twitter.