Bumptious is a word I have never heard spoken and have only seen in print. I understood it to mean benignly unruly or high-spirited, like an excitable boy. That’s not right. The OED gives “irritatingly self-assertive or conceited.” This week I found bumptious in John Clare’s The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems (1821). I can take Clare in small doses, and suspect the recent revival of interest in his work is more related to his mental illness and devotion to the natural world than to his modest poetical gift. In stanza LXVII of the title poem, Clare writes:
“The
bumptious serjeant struts before his men,
And ‘clear
the road, young whopstraws!’ will he say;
And looks as
big as if king George himsen,
And wields
his sword around to make a way . . .”
The OED defines whopstraw as “a country bumpkin” and cites Clare’s usage. For bumptious we might say cocky, self-important,
overweening. A reporting colleague once referred to a notably bumptious editor
as “the only guy I’ve ever known who could strut while sitting down.”
Coincidentally,
while reading Auden the other day, I happened on bumptious again. In “Friday’s Child” (1958) he writes: “He told us
we were free to choose / But, children as we were, we thought-- / ‘Paternal
Love will only use / Force in the last resort / On those too bumptious to
repent.’” Auden dedicates the poem “(In memory of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred
at Flossenbürg, April 9, 1945).”
Anthony Hecht says in his book-length interview Anthony Hecht in Conversation with Philip Hoy (Between the Lines, 1999), “There is much about this I have never spoken about, and never will.” Hecht recounts atrocities he witnessed while serving with the U.S. 97th Infantry Division in Europe during World War II. He was among the troops who liberated the extermination and slave-labor camp at Flossenbürg, an annex of Buchenwald, where 500 prisoners a day were dying of typhus. Bonhoeffer, unknown to Hecht at the time, had been hanged there for “antiwar activity” a few days earlier. (Bonhoeffer’s final words, according to one account, as the executioners took him away: “This is the end – for me, the beginning of life.”) Hecht says to Hoy: “The place, the suffering, the prisoners’ accounts were beyond comprehension. For years after I would wake shrieking.”
I just came across bumptious the day before yesterday, in Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence: "From the very beginning of the industrial revolution He foresaw that men would be made so over-weeningly bumptious by the miracles of their own technology that they would soon lose all sense of reality."
ReplyDelete(The "He" referred to is Belial, and the speaker is a priest of a new devil-worshipping religion which has emerged after World War Three obliterated human civilization. His argument is that "modern man" was literally devil-possessed; nothing else could explain his demented actions. It's hard to argue with, isn't it?)