braggadocious

[Jonathan Lighter]

Culturally I would never have associated "braggadocious" with "the
Sopranos." I'd associate it with "bodacious," "teetotaciously" and
"exflunctify."

In fact, I am now reminded that the word appears in Mezzrow & Wolfe's
classic of dedicated jive-talk whiggery, _Really the Blues_ (1947).

It isn't in HDAS because: 1. only a single cite. 2. I persuaded myself it
was AAVE "dialect," i.e. normal in AAVE, unknown elsewhere.

GB, however, reveals one from the English _Strand_ magazine (birthplace of
Sherlock Holmes) allegedly from 1912: the typeface and style seem right.

The "1913" ex. may be real too, but the typeface makes it suspicious.
Between then and 1947, mostly silence.

I suspect independent invention and reinvention.

JL

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:56 AM, Garson O'Toole
<adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: braggadocious
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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."
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
> >
>
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>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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