Imprecation
A formal curse or invoked misfortune — the dark twin of the blessing.
An imprecation is speech that calls down harm: a curse, an oath of ill-wishing, a formal malediction. It appears in legal and religious history as a binding formula — the curses appended to treaties, the imprecatory psalms, the inscribed defixiones of the Greek and Roman world — and in literature as a character's most extreme rhetorical register.
Structurally imprecations mirror benedictions almost exactly: an invoked power, a named target, and a specified fate. That symmetry is why the two forms are often quoted side by side in studies of ritual language.
Quoting imprecation requires framing. Unlike most quotations, an imprecation quoted approvingly reads as endorsement of the harm it names, so editors typically supply the speaker's situation and the text's genre before the line itself.
Common mistake: reading imprecatory passages in ancient texts as personal spite. Most are formulaic, drawn from a shared legal-religious stock, and their extremity is generic convention rather than individual venom.
“Let his days be few; and let another take his office.”
Keep reading the glossary
A short formal blessing spoken over an audience, usually at a close.
Language of attack: abuse shaped by craft rather than simply shouted.
A prolonged lamentation or bitter complaint, typically warning of moral or social decline.
A quotation stripped of the surrounding argument or occasion that made it mean what it originally meant.