Rodomontade
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Many others have likewise presented us with their own travels and peregrinations, where they tell us of wondrous large beasts, savage men, and unheard-of ways of living. The great leader and master of all this rhodomontade is Homer’s “Ulysses,” who talks to Alcinous about the winds pent up in bags, man-eaters, and one-eyed Cyclops, wild men, creatures with many heads, several of his companions turned into beasts by enchantment, and a thousand things of this kind, which he related to the ignorant and credulous Phæacians." --A True Story by Lucian, Thomas Francklin translation |
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Rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-muhn-TAHD\ is a mass noun meaning boastful talk or behavior. The term is a reference to Rodomonte, a character in Italian Renaissance epic poems Orlando innamorato and its sequel Orlando furioso.
Examples of use
- A 19th-century example of the use of the term can be found in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville by Washington Irving. Irving used it to describe the behavior of "free trappers", fur trappers who worked freelance and adopted the manner, habits, and dress of the native Americans. When free trappers visited Bonneville's camp, he welcomed them and ordered grog for everyone:
- They [the free trappers] pronounced the captain the finest fellow in the world, and his men all bon garçons, jovial lads, and swore they would pass the day with them. They did so, and a day it was, of boast, and swagger, and rodomontade.
- The word, with its alternative spelling (rhodomontade) is quoted in John Lukacs' book Five Days in London May 1940. While describing the tempestuous days of Churchill's first weeks in office, Lukacs quotes Alex Cadogan, a bureaucrat with the Foreign Office, counselling Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax who was complaining that he could no longer work with Churchill. Cadogan said:
- Nonsense: his rhodomontades probably bore you as much as they do me, but don't do anything silly under the stress of that.
- The term was used in Desert Island Discs by The Smiths front-man Morrissey when describing his own music.
- William F. Buckley used the word in a May 29, 1995 column in the National Review entitled "What does Clinton have in mind? - Pres. Clinton's attack on conservative radio broadcasts"; Buckley, asking rhetorically whom Clinton was attacking, cited one theory:
- The best those commentators could do who appeared on the MacNeil - Lehrer program was to quote an imprudent remark by Gordon Liddy, but what he said — that if any official came to his house to requisition his pistol, he'd better shoot straight — was more rodomontade than a call to arms or hatred.
- William Makepeace Thackeray uses the word to describe a letter written by the eponymous hero of 'The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.'.
- The term was used by W. Somerset Maugham in 'Of Human Bondage' in Athelny's conversation, over tea, with his daughter's suitor. -
'He (Athelny) addressed himself directly to his guest with a torrent of rhodomontade '.
- Vladimir Nabokov criticized Fyodor Dostoevsky for his "gothic rodomontade."
