Bb: Braggadocio

n. pl. brag·ga·do·ci·os 1. A braggart. 2. a. Empty or pretentious bragging. b. A swaggering, cocky manner. [Alteration of Braggadocchio, the personification of vainglory in The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, from brag.]

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Simple Sentence to Use at Your Club's Next Cocktail Party:

We all knew that Mr. Machio was a braggadocio.. We didn't believe that he went to Harvard;  nor that he had worked for NASA and planted a flag on the moon; nor that he had amassed millions before he had lost it all in Vegas.   

Words in Context:
On the following morning, Captain Bonneville purchased a supply of buffalo meat from his braggadocio friends; who, with all their vaporing, were in fact a very forlorn horde, destitute of firearms, and of almost everything that constitutes riches in savage life.The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the far West by Irving, Washington View in context


The Hunt for Words: Inspired to look up word because of Joseph Campbell's belief in Metaphor being more than a simile; so then I looked at the references in J.A. Cuddon's book A Dictionary of Literary Terms,  for metaphor, which then brought me to archetype.  Under character archetypes I found the word braggadocio, which I did not know so I looked it up.    


Audio/Visual