pynchon-l-digest V2 #7267

[Dave Monroe]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 2:01 PM, John Carvill <johncarvill at gmail.com> wrote:

>> An aside, possibly a digression: Was "A Confederacy of Dunces" the
>> first recorded usage of 'bloviate'?
>
> Dunno. If so, it would be highly appropriate.

BLOVIATE/ˈbləʊvɪeɪt/

To speak pompously.

This word is almost entirely restricted to the United States; it
doesn’t appear in any of my British English dictionaries, not even the
big Oxford English Dictionary or the very recent New Oxford Dictionary
of English. Yet it has a long history.

It’s most closely associated with U S President Warren Gamaliel
Harding, who used it a lot and who was by all accounts the classic
example of somebody who orates verbosely and windily. It’s a compound
of blow, in its sense of “to boast” (also in another typical
Americanism, blowhard), with a mock-Latin ending to give it the
self-important stature that’s implicit in its meaning.

The word is actually much older than Harding; Fred Shapiro of the Yale
Law School has recently turned up several examples from the middle of
the last century, such as this one from the Debates and Proceedings of
the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of
Ohio in 1851: “The bloviators attempt to disturb the proceedings of
this Convention”. This and other examples suggest it was at first a
local word in Ohio, Harding’s home state. Bloviate may be a
back-formation from the noun bloviation. This would fit with the US
fashion in the early nineteenth century for expansive mock-Latinate
words like sockdolager, hornswoggle and absquatulate.

There’s a gap in the citation record in the middle years of this
century. The word only began to be used again in the 1960s, even then
at first always in reference to Harding. This may be linked with a
number of biographies of him that appeared about that time. The word
only returned to any sort of regular use in the nineties.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-blo1.htm