bemoan - vocabulary

bemoan - verb

To lament; to express grief or distress over; to regard with disapproval or regret.

Back in May, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton publicly admonished young folks for thinking of work as a "four-letter word," prompting a shaming from her own overachieving 27-year-old daughter. Six and a half months closer to the election, it appears Clinton now thinks it strategically unwise to insult an entire voting bloc that leans Democratic . . . .

So what's happened over the past six-plus months? Have we sub-30ers been so driven to prove Clinton's youth-shaming wrong that we've signed up by the millions with AmeriCorps and Teach for America? Most likely, Clinton's flip-flop on Generation Lazy has more to do with her and other presidential candidates' views on what constitutes proper and praiseworthy youth. To them (and many others in their age group), young folks are at their best when they perform tough work on the cheap or for free, and at their worst when they look for gratifying jobs that pay competitive salaries. Indeed, in that May speech in which Hillary bemoaned lazy youth, she decried the supposed "culture that has a premium on instant gratification," of which young people are supposedly a product.

—Paul Thornton Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2007

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