Sunday Word: Bloviate

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bloviate [bloh-vee-eyt]

verb:
speak or write verbosely and windily

Examples:

Judging by its enthusiasm, the local baseball media, and anyone else paid to bloviate about sports, is urging the Mets to hire Buck Showalter. (Bob Raissman, Bob Raissman: Joe Judge isn't fooling anyone with delusional press conferences, New York Daily News, December 2021)

Politicians excel at it to the point where I think the first thing they teach you in first-time politician classes is how to bloviate for an hour without ever saying anything of substance. (Curtis Honeycutt, Grammar Guy: When you say nothing at all, The Berkshire Eagle, June 2021)

"The many characters at Pelican Roost sing and dance, revel and kvetch, celebrate and bloviate their way through Christmas and Hanukkah," they said. ('Assisted Living the Musical' sequel is selling out, Venice Gondolier, November 2021)

Origin:

1857, American English, a Midwestern word for 'to talk aimlessly and boastingly; to indulge in 'high falutin',' according to Farmer (1890), who seems to have been the only British lexicographer to notice it. He says it was based on blow (v.1) on the model of deviate, etc.

It seems to have been felt as outdated slang already by late 19c. ('It was a pleasure for him to hear the Doctor talk, or, as it was inelegantly expressed in the phrase of the period, 'bloviate' ....' ['Overland Monthly,' San Francisco, 1872, describing a scene from 1860]), but it enjoyed a revival early 1920s during the presidency of Warren G Harding, who wrote a notoriously ornate and incomprehensible prose (e e cummings eulogized him as 'The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors') at which time the word took on its connection with political speech; it faded again thereafter, but, with its derivative, bloviation, it enjoyed a revival in the 2000 U.S. election season that continued through the era of blogging. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Warren G Harding is often linked to bloviate, but to him the word wasn't insulting; it simply meant 'to spend time idly.' Harding used the word often in that 'hanging around' sense, but during his tenure as the 29th US President (1921-23), he became associated with the 'verbose' sense of bloviate, perhaps because his speeches tended to the long-winded side. Although he is sometimes credited with having coined the word, it's more likely that Harding picked it up from local slang while hanging around with his boyhood buddies in Ohio in the late 1800s. The term probably derives from a combination of the word blow plus the suffix -ate. (Merriam-Webster)

Bloviate is not, however, a recent creation. It was apparently coined in the mid-nineteenth century and was found in slang dictionaries by the end of the nineteenth century. Some of the early examples still strike the modern ear as contemporary sounding; the Literary Digest in 1909 derided a proposal to create a state of Los Angeles, "which would rid California of a maximum of bluster and bloviation and a minimum of territory." Hmm, still sounds viable. But bloviate was chiefly popularized by President Warren G. Harding in the early 1920s, and current examples often mention him as the inspiration for the word.

The word bloviate is, of course, an Americanism. It is a pseudo-Latin alteration of blow, in its slang sense 'to boast', also the inspiration for the early-nineteenth-century blowhard. This type of word-formation - adding Latinate affixes to English words - was popular at the time; some of the words that still have some currency is [Sic] absquatulate [1] 'to run away; flee' from abscond and squat, and obfusticated, for 'confused; obfuscated.' (Words Worth)