The diatribe is a unique rhetorical form. The rhetor relies on obscenities, strident moralism, slang, and advocacy of a “counter‐culture” to protest corrupt cultures. It was invented by the Cynics of Athens and revived by the Yippies to protest the war in Vietnam. It is a product of basic commitments about the nature of man and forged by circumstances that rhetors believe exclude conventional means of protest.
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Theodore Otto Windt (1972) studied this question.