Transcript for the Piece Audio version of bombast - word of the day

This is the etymology moment, and I'm Charles Hodgson. Today we'll hear the story behind the word bombast.
To be bombastic is to speak or write in a high flown, overdone and especially pompous tone. But the origin of the word comes down to us from the most modest of sources; a worm. Specifically a silk worm. The ancient Greek word for a silk worm was bombux which was absorbed into Latin as bombyx and survives today as the scientific name of silkworms and silkworm moths Bombyx mori. But like certain words in English that are shared between related things?for example a letter is a thing you write, and the symbol you use to do the writing?bombux and bombyx came to mean not only silk worms but silk itself. They didn't appear in English as words meaning silk, but instead, when some newfangled substance started to be imported into England some time in the decades before Shakespeare, it came with the appellation, from French, of bombace?with the explanation that this was silk of the trees. In fact it was cotton, a word that had been in English already for a few hundred years. But thus the meaning of the word shifted upon entering English from silk to cotton, and in particular a type of raw cotton especially useful for padding. So when it came time to invent a metaphor for someone who was puffing up their rhetoric unnecessarily, padding it, bombast nicely filled the gap. The other day I mentioned a founding figure in modern medicine, Paracelsus. His actual name was Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Because he was such an antisocial arrogant guy there are etymological theories floating around out there that it was one of his names that gave bombast its English meaning. But in fact the Oxford English Dictionary goes to the trouble of pointing out that this is false. I'm left guessing that perhaps some of his forebears were in the silk trade or something. As an aside I was tickled to learn that another word with a similar meaning to bombast, fustian also has a previous life as a kind of cotton fabric. I only came across it because the word bombast is the word so frequently used to define what fustian now means.