...If I Do Say So Myself

This week’s readings included the word rodomontade. It’s a good word that can be used with impunity in describing the boasting or bragging nature that you find displeasing. (Some of you may actually find boasting or bragging pleasing. You can stop reading now.)

Rodomontade has an interesting etymology. It came to English in the 1610s, although it had an earlier more Italian version in English spelled rodomontado, in the 1590s. It comes from the name of a character in Ludivico Ariosto’s epic 16^th century poem Orlando Furioso, which can be translated as “The Frenzy of Orlando” or more literally “Raging Roland.” The latter translation is important because the poem shares some features with the (to me, at least) more famous and older (11^th century) French epic poem Chanson de Roland (source of the word termagent). Orlando Furioso has inspired creative works by many artists, including Vivaldi, Shakespeare, and Delacroix.

Rodomont (as he’s called in the Gutenberg Project’s translation by William Steward Rose) is one of the main characters, a fierce Muslim warrior and King of Algiers who is quoted as saying

I am that Rodomont, whose martial worth

Scatters its splendor through this ample earth.

Rodomont Is known for his boasting, his gasconade, his bombast. And so that boasting, bragging, bombastic nature is now known as rodomontade.

Which brings us to the word bombast. What is bombast, or being bombastic? Is it related to bombs? 

Bombastic is defined as high-flown or high-sounding (like a bomb?), inflated, or pretentious. Bombast is defined as speech that is too pompous or pretentious. (I’m never guilty of bombast.) It used to be the word for cotton or other batting used for stuffing clothing. In fact, that was its original definition when it came to English in the 1560s. The word is a corruption of the Old French word bombace that means cotton or cotton wadding. The Old French got it from Latin, where it was bombacem, the accusative (why would you accuse cotton?) of bombax, which itself was a corruption and transferred use of the Latin word bombyx that means silk and comes from the Greek word for silk or silkworm: bombyx. You can't get much further from bombs than silkworms. By the 1580s bombast came to mean any inflated, padded, or pompous speech. 

Bombastic, the adjective form, took over 200 years (it arrived in 1704) to come to English use, and originally just meant inflated. But by 1727 it was being used to describe language that is “inflated” as well.

Bombast is related to bluster in meaning. While the word bluster originally came to English in the late 1300s as a verb for violent blowing of wind, it eventually became a noun (in the 1580s) that not only meant a strong wind or boisterous noise but also inflated talk. The word bluster came from a Low German source: Middle Low German has the word blüstren as does East Frisian. (No, I don’t know what West Frisian has instead.)

Rodomontade is boasting or bragging, while bombast is described well as inflated talk. Bombast is expansive and pedantic, but not necessarily about oneself. Bluster has a sense of deception that bombast does not have. Three good words, if I do say so myself, and that might make me guilty of  rodomontade.