Topic summary
harangue
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Diatribe.
Historical meaning
The terms diatribe and rant (and, to a lesser extent, tirade and harangue) have at times been subtly distinguished, but in modern discourse are often used interchangeably. A diatribe or rant is not a formal classification of argument, and religious author Alistair Stewart-Sykes notes that "[t]he form of the diatribe is difficult precisely to ascertain". It has been proposed that the terms diatribe, tirade, harangue, and rant "are similar, but offer different shades of meaning":