Bloviate

Bloviate (pronounced bloh-vee-yet)

Pompously to speak or discourse at length in a boastful manner.

1857: A coining in US English, a construction in pseudo-Latin, based on deviate on the pattern of blow (in the senses of “a blowhard” (to boast)) + -ate.  Blow was from the Middle English blowen, from the Old English blāwan (to blow, breathe, inflate, sound), from the Proto-West Germanic blāan, from the Proto-Germanic blēaną (to blow) (linked to the modern German blähen), from the primitive Indo-European bhleh- (to swell, blow up) (linked to the Latin flō (to blow) and the Old Armenian բեղուն (bełun) (fertile).  The suffix -ate was a word-forming element used in forming nouns from Latin words ending in -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as estate, primate & senate).  Those that came to English via French often began with -at, but an -e was added in the fifteenth century or later to indicate the long vowel.  It can also mark adjectives formed from Latin perfect passive participle suffixes of first conjugation verbs -ātus, -āta, & -ātum (such as desolate, moderate & separate).  Again, often they were adopted in Middle English with an –at suffix, the -e appended after circa 1400; a doublet of –ee.

Bloviate was noted in the US in 1890 by a visiting English lexicographer who traced the origins to 1857 as a Midwestern (apparently in Ohio where it meant "to talk aimlessly and boastingly) word which gained the sense of “to indulge high falutin' language” when applied to politicians.  Bloviate was itself thus something of a bloviation because it was a way of saying “windbag” or “blowhard” with a Latin suffix lending a classical flavor.  It was apparently most used (at least in print; casual oral use would have been more prolific) of politicians (predictably fertile ground one suspects) but it faded from use by the early twentieth century, only to be revived during the administration of Warren Harding (1865–1923; US president 1921-1923) who quickly became notorious for his tangled, ornate and occasionally incomprehensible prose.  The biographical evidence suggests Harding reserved his bloviatory ways for his public persona, his language at the poker table as direct as is expected at such a place, something confirmed in the memoir of one of his many mistresses.  Harding of course is associated also with his alleged invention of “normalcy”, claimed to be a mistake during a speech laden with alliterative flourishes in which he said "not nostrums, but normalcy", the claim being he intended to use “normality”.

“America’s present need is not heroics, but healing; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.”

In saying "normalcy" he may have misspoken (ie a mistake rather than as a synonym for lie as crooked Hillary Clinton uses the word) or perhaps Harding liked the word; questioned afterwards he said he found it in a dictionary which probably was true although whether his discovery came before or after the speech wasn't explored.  Harding’s choice was much-derided at the time, normalcy had certainly existed since at least 1857, originally as a technical term from geometry meaning the "mathematical condition of being at right angles, state or fact of being normal in geometry" but subsequently it had appeared in print as a synonym of normality on several occasions.  Still, it was hardly in general use though Harding gave it a boost and it’s not since gone extinct, now with little complaint except from the linguistically fastidious.  Anyway, at the time it did him little harm.  The speech was delivered during the 1920 presidential election and Harding was elected in a landslide, the Republican ticket taking the Electoral College 404-127 with 60.4 against 34.1% of the popular vote.  In an example of how the electoral map has changed over a century, in 1920 the Democratic Party’s successes were almost exclusively south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

The political re-alignment in the US, 1920-2020; Democrats are blue, Republicans red.  

So electoral behavior in the US has changed in a century but the rhetorical habits of politicians probably haven't and bloviate made its second comeback in the 1990s.  Apparently the combination of the emergence of Newt Gingrich et al as neo-bloviators and the novel medium of the internet spread the word, giving it a niche, first on the bulletin boards and later on blogs, twitter and social media as technology unfolded, the 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of political commentators meaning the ranks swelled.  In every electoral cycle since 1994, bloviators have been identified and shamed or celebrated as required.  Harding was at least self-aware, proud of his skill at “speaking as long as the occasion warrants and saying nothing” but still annoyed critics like the humorist HL Mencken (1880-1956) who dismissed the content of Harding’s English as a “loud burble of words fit only for morons and small-town yokels” although even he acknowledged the technique was so honed that “a sort of grandeur creeps into it.”

Noted bloviator Newt Gingrich (b 1943; speaker of the US House of Representatives 1995-1999 (right)) with Joe Biden (b1942; US president since 2021 (left)).  Biden now doesn’t so much bloviate as ramble and meander.

It was the idea of “fake grandeur” that saw Barack Obama (b 1961, US president 2009-2017) labeled a bloviator by some but that was as misleading as it was to call Donald Trump “the bloviating billionaire”.  Obama at his worst talked what Lord Beaverbrook (1879-1964) would have called “high falutin' nonsense” but was usually quite direct.  Trump too was direct and never tried, like George W Bush (b 1946; US president 2001-2009) or Sarah Palin (b 1964) to lend gravitas to the message with fancy (an in some cases invented) words in the manner of a Norman Mailer (1923-2007), William F Buckley (1925-2008), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997), Conrad Black (b 1944), Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) and David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), bloviators all.

Noted bloviators William F Buckley (left) and Gore Vidal (right) in one of their famous debates on the ABC network in 1968.

Conducted in the milieu that was the drama of the 1968 Republican and Democratic Party conventions, ABC envisaged it as an exchange between intellectuals of the right and left but what made it a ratings hit was Vidal calling Buckley a "crypto-Nazi" to which he responded, "Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered".  Overnight, it transformed the way the broadcast media covered politics in the US and it’s from this "debate" that the descent began towards ideological confrontation and partisan commentary.  In political science, there had long been the "politics as theatre" school of thought but it was from this debate that the packaging of politics as entertainment was allowed to evolve undisguised.

Trump is better thought of as a rodomont, the essence of rhodomontade being vain boasting, bragging and blustering without any suggestion of the use of obscure or big words; the undercurrent of everything Trump says is “I’m really rich” and that’s all that matters.  It dates from the 1610s (the earlier rodomontado noted in the 1590s), and was from the French rodomontade, a reference to the vain boasting of Rodomonte, a character who appears in two epic poems of the Italian Renaissance: Ludovico Ariosto's (1474–1533) Orlando Furioso (1516) and Matteo Maria Boiardo's (1440–1494) Orlando Innamorato (1483-1495).  In the dialectal Italian, the name translates literally as "one who rolls (away) the mountain" and it came by the 1680s to be used as a verb imparting the idea of “one who boasts, brags and talks big".

A noted rodomont with a noted bloviatrix: Donald Trump (b 1946; US president 2017-2021) with crooked Hillary Clinton (b 1947), 2016 presidential election debate.

A non standard variation is bloviatrix (literally “a woman who bloviates”) and now of course it would be less incorrect to call one a bloviator but it was always intended as a jocular coining.  The –trix suffix was from the primitive Indo-European -trih, from -tḗr and was cognate with the Sanskrit suffix -त्री (-trī) (as in जनित्री (janitrī) (mother) though most dictionaries now tag –trix as dated.  It was appended usually to create female agent nouns and for masculine agent nouns ending in -tor, the feminine equivalent ending in -trix was historically preferred (and etymologically consistent) but social forces now operate with some severity in English and the modern practice is to adopt either gender-neutral terms, even other feminine suffixes (-a, -ess, -ette & -ine) falling from favor.  It endures where the meaning conveyed is so specific that any substitution would be either misleading or just silly, dominatrix the most obvious example and it’s usually the case these derived terms were borrowed directly from Latin, rather than formed in English (where in recent centuries the creations tended variously to be jocular, poetic or derogatory).  The Latin forms were just part of the lexicon such as cantrīx (female singer), based on cantor (male singer), from canō (I sing), tōnstrīx (female barber) based on tōnsor (male barber), from tondeō (I shear, shave) & meretrīx (prostitute (literally “she who earns”), from mereō (I merit, deserve, earn).  The Latin suffix was picked up by other European languages including the Catalan -triu, the French –trice, the Italian –trice and the Portuguese & Spanish –triz.

Bloviate is also jocular slang in the engine-building community.  Because of the phonetic similarity to “blown V8” (ie a V8 engine with forced (super- or turbo-charged) induction), it’s used to refer to such machinery.  The comparative and superlative forms presumably are “very bloviated” & “most bloviated” respectively, based on the extent of atmospheric boost delivered.

A noted bloviate: Mopar Direct Connection 1500 HEMI Crate Engine (Part Number: DSR1500-DC) @ US$59,990.  The 1500 is “most bloviated”.

Dodge's Hellephants (as crate engines) are 426 cubic inch (7.0 litre) V8s, based on the Gen III HEMI V8 in five versions ranging from 900 to 1500hp, all using DSR’s 3.0 litre (183 cubic inch) IHI supercharger and available with either cast-iron or aluminium blocks.  Not remotely lawful for use in the US in road-registered vehicles built after 1975, most are used in some form of competition and although such things are thought by many to be in their last days, the crate engines may remain available until (1) they’re outlawed, (2) demand falls to the point production is no longer viable or (3) pressure-groups force Chrysler to stop.  As recently as twenty-odd years ago, there was much nostalgia about "the way things used to be done" but, on any objective measure, the Hellephants are better than anything which came before.  Despite that, some things will always be cherished for the flaws and quirks which give them their character and for some, the old ways, while not better, will remain more enchanting.