{"id":484,"date":"2010-07-26T07:39:46","date_gmt":"2010-07-26T12:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.manhattangre.com\/blog\/?p=484"},"modified":"2019-08-30T16:53:42","modified_gmt":"2019-08-30T16:53:42","slug":"talking-like-a-fancy-pants-florid-vs-bombastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/blog\/talking-like-a-fancy-pants-florid-vs-bombastic\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking Like a Fancy-Pants: Florid vs. Bombastic"},"content":{"rendered":"

English has many words to describe all-too-fancy writing. A good one is florid<\/a>, which means “flowery” — that is, using an excess of adjectives, figurative language, and, often, unnecessary descriptions of the landscape.<\/p>\n

Some people think Hawthorne was a rather florid writer:<\/p>\n

\"TheLike all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice<\/a>, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial<\/a> in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bombastic<\/a> writing has the added element of being pretentious<\/a>. From Christopher Marlowe:<\/p>\n

Our quivering lances, shaking in the air,
\nAnd bullets, like Jove’s dreadful thunderbolts,
\nEnroll’d in flames and fiery smouldering mists,
\nShall threat the gods more than Cyclopean<\/a> wars;
\nAnd with our sun\u0090bright armour, as we march,
\nWe’ll chase the stars from heaven, and dim their eyes
\nThat stand and muse at our admired arms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fun fact: bombast<\/i> was once padding material used to puff up clothes!<\/p>\n

Florid and bombastic writing is sometimes referred to as purple prose<\/a> (since purple was once a sign of royalty, and sometimes lower-class people would display little bits of purple on their clothes to try to seem fancy). The Wikipedia page quotes several examples from Edward Bulwer-Lytton (the “It was a dark and stormy night” guy):<\/p>\n

Other instances of purple prose quoted from the novel include “As soon as the Promethean spark had been fully communicated to the lady’s tube” (meaning Once the lady lit her pipe), “a nectarian beverage” (wine), “a somnambular accommodation” (a bedroom), and so on.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And finally, don’t forget grandiloquent<\/a> and magniloquent<\/a>, two more words for talking like a fancy-pants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

English has many words to describe all-too-fancy writing. A good one is florid, which means “flowery” — that is, using an excess of adjectives, figurative language, and, often, unnecessary descriptions of the landscape. Some people think Hawthorne was a rather florid writer: Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,12,13],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gre-strategies","category-verbal","category-vocabulary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7397,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions\/7397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=484"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.manhattanprep.com\/gre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}