JAMES J. KILPATRICK

JAMES J. KILPATRICK

Universal Press Syndicate

Time magazine last year gave a crushed-ice review to a book of memoirs by Willie Morris: “Dewy-eyed ex-editor bloviates about his '60s.” Rubbing it in, the Times critic charged the former boy wonder of Harper's with “a truly terrible bloviation of his prose."

Bloviation? In recent weeks a dozen readers have inquired about the word. To bloviate is to speak pompously, windily, verbosely. It is a beautiful verb.

The Congressional Record is filled with bloviation. But in responding to curious readers, I have been spreading misinformation.

I have hazarded a guess that William Safire of The New York Times invented the word. “To bloviate” has the bell-like chime of Safirean inspiration. But, no. I have been disabused by the old maven himself.

In his New Political Dictionary (1993) Safire says that the word goes back at least to 1850; it appears in a dictionary of slang published in 1889; in 1909 the Louisville (Ky.) CourierJournal proposed to make L.os Angeles a state, the better to rid California of "bluster and bloviation.”

What puzzles me (a great many things puzzle me) is that so few lexicographers appear to have stumbled over "bloviate.” The verb cannot be found in any contemporary desk dictionary; it does not appear in the compendious Dictionary of American Regional F.nglish, though Safire says that “to bloviate” meant “to loaf” in Ohio in the 1920s. It is not in the new Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang. A mystery. Perhaps the verb will make MerriamWebster’s Eleventh Collegiate. It didn't make the Tenth.

Readers have sent in a number of citations of possible neologisms that turn out to be golden oldies. Meg Greenfield, the gifted essayist of Newsweek, spoke in September of “these parlous times.” The adjective.