the.com/bombast
Big words doing a small idea's heavy lifting.
means Speech or writing that sounds grand and important but has little real substance behind it.
from Comes from 'bombace,' the old word for cotton wadding used to pad and stuff clothing — ultimately traced back through French and Latin to the Greek 'bombyx,' meaning silk or silkworm. The link is pure physicality: just as padding puffs out a garment to look fuller than it is, bombastic language puffs out an idea to seem weightier than it actually is. The word shifted from describing stuffed fabric to describing stuffed rhetoric by the late 1500s.
- origin
- from cotton padding used to stuff clothes
- tell
- the louder the phrasing, the thinner the point
- cousin
- pomposity's noisier, less self-aware sibling
- cure
- ask what the sentence means without adjectives