From the Los Angeles Times
Op-Ed: The return of the bloviator
By Geoffrey Nunberg
As Donald Trump surges, so does "bloviate." "The bloviating billionaire" — it's clearly an alliteration whose time has come. But there's hardly a candidate or commentator who hasn't been labeled with the word. Thirty years ago it was dated slang; now it's seen as the prevailing vice of our public discourse.
"Bloviate" has risen and fallen in American life. It was coined in the 1840s from "blow," a facetious pseudo-Latinism mocking the inflated oratory of an era when, as Tocqueville observed, Americans couldn't take to the stump without "venting their pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other."...