braggadocious

[Garson O'Toole]

Michael Quinion discusses braggadocious on a web page dated September 14, 2002.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/topicalwords/tw-bra2.htm

Here is an excerpt:

Braggadocious? That word hasn’t yet entered any dictionary that I know
of, though you can find many examples online and it sometimes turns up
in American newspapers. As far back as 1987, presidential contender
Jack Kemp was described in Time: “He is proud of his erudition, using
French phrases like elan vital, but he sometimes tosses out strange
neologisms, like ‘braggadocious’”. We can forgive the writer of this
piece for not having come across the word before. I’ve found earlier
examples, though, so it’s clear that Mr Kemp didn’t coin it.

It’s a very Sopranos sort of word, in fact, because it’s a derivative
of the mock-Italian braggadocio, meaning an idle boaster. The Daily
Telegraph obituary of John Gotti, the Mafia boss who died in June,
described him as being “full of swaggering braggadocio and brimming
with cocksure self-confidence”. That’s the idea in a nutshell.

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: braggadocious
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I warned about this in 2008. Now it's back.  CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin used
> the word _braggadocious_ while interviewing an FBI official, who responded
> "They were very much braggadocious about what they had done."
>
> 63,000 raw G hits - and that's only for the most sophisticated spelling.
>
> The closest the OED comes is "braggadocian," which is almost the same thing,
> except that it went away three hundred years ago.
>
> JL
>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>
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