'Never Perfectly Free from Giddiness'

Yet another unfamiliar word I would like to see revived: gasconade. Dr. Johnson gives a typically terse definition: “a boast; a bravado.” He cites the letter Jonathan Swift wrote to Alexander Pope in which I encountered the word this week: “Was it a gasconade to please me, that you said your fortune was increased to one hundred a year since I left you?”

 As a noun, the word entered English from the French in the seventeenth century. Later it became a verb and an adjective. The OED’s definition is “extravagant boasting or exaggeration; boastful or bombastic language.” In other words, bluster, bloviation, braggadocio, magniloquence, bullshit, the way politicians talk. Richard Steele used the word in The Tatler No. 115 in 1709: “[H]is great volubility and inimitable manner of speaking, as well as the great courage he showed on those occasions, did sometimes betray him into that figure of speech which is commonly distinguished by the name of ‘gasconade.’” Other sources cited are Tobias Smollett and John Quincey Adams. 

 

Swift’s letter to Pope is dated August 11, 1729. In it, he describes symptoms of a chronic inner-ear disorder – likely, scholars have deduced, Ménière's disease – that plagued him from the age of twenty. Swift suffered from vertigo, nausea, tinnitus and progressive deafness:

 

“[M]y head is never perfectly free from giddiness, and especially toward night. Yet my disorder is very moderate, and I have been without a fit of deafness this half year; so I am like a horse, which, though off his mettle, can trot on tolerably; and this comparison puts me in mind to add that I am returned to be a rider, wherein I wish you would imitate me.”