The word blatteroon is from Latin blatero + -onis. In 1887, James Murray, primary editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), included blatteroon among his entries, having drawn it from Thomas Blount’s Glossographia of 1656. Its entry into the OED sparked a minor revival of the word where it otherwise would have faded into history.
Though blatteroon is considered obsolete, it exemplifies a type of loathsome behavior that is readily recognizable throughout history. We have no shortage of contemporary words to describe such personalities, including blowhard, big mouth, loudmouth, windbag, gasbag, and grandstander.
Originating in Midwestern American slang, bloviate is another word that has had a renaissance in past decades. Meaning “to indulge in ‘high falutin’,” the etymology suggests that bloviate is a “compound of blow, in the sense of “to boast” with a mock-Latin ending, as in the word deviate. Bloviate is further defined as “a kind of baby talk, a puerile and wind-blown gibberish. In content, it is a vacuum.”
Bloviation and its style of empty political speech were used to describe US President Warren G. Harding (1921-1923) and his “art of speaking for as long as the occasion warrants, and saying nothing.” His opponent, William Gibbs McAdoo, described Mr. Harding’s oratory skills as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.” e.e. cummings eulogized the former president as “The only man, woman, or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors.”
It seems that history never fails to repeat itself.
You might also be interested in learning about Old English words that are worth bringing back! Check out this post on the naughty language of expletive infixations (NSFW), or the surprising history of the verb friend!
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