Today’s prompt is brought to you by Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day… albeit their word of the day on the 7th of September, as opposed to today.

That word is ‘grandiloquent’, and it means ‘speaking or expressed in a lofty style, often to the point of being pompous’.

As with a lot of words in the English dictionary, grandiloquent has its roots in Latin, and its first recorded use was between 1585 and 1595. I can imagine someone using it to describe the speech of politicians, or the conversation of nobility. It is certainly easy to imagine using it to describe modern political waffle, and in particular, the waffle and prattle of Conservative MPs (or should that be former Conservative MP?) like Boris Johnson, and his Etonian chums.

However, it is not without a certain measure of irony that the word itself sounds quite pompous. It’s hard to imagine the working class peasants of the 16th Century using such a word, so it seems more likely (to this ‘kat) that it might have been a term politicians threw at each other. One truth of the political arena, whether historical or modern, is that politicians love to needle each other, and referencing an MP’s pompous nature is easy, if low-hanging, fruit.

It is also a word that I can’t say I’ve encountered before. It is not mainstream, but then, a lot of words of the day found via Dictionary.com aren’t mainstream. I need to think of how to insert this into one of my stories.

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