Rodomontade

Examples of use

• A 17th-century example of the term exists in Don Tomazo by Thomas Dangerfield, albeit with a slight alteration of spelling. As the titular protagonist heads towards Cairo with a number of stolen treasures, he is informed by an acquaintance that:
• The German composer Georg Philipp Telemann composed a Suite in h minor for violin solo, strings and continuo, which ends with a piece named "Rodomontade".
• A 19th-century example of the use of the term can be found in The Adventures of Captain Bonneville by Washington Irving. Irving used it to describe the behavior of "free trappers", fur trappers who worked freelance and adopted the manner, habits, and dress of the native Americans. When free trappers visited Bonneville's camp, he welcomed them and ordered grog for everyone:
• Another 19th-century example can be found in Thomas Carlyle's 1829 essay Signs of the Times:
• In Natsume Soseki's novel, I am a Cat, when referring to the feline character Rickshaw Blacky: "Blacky, like all true braggarts, is somewhat weak in the head. As long as you purr and listen attentively, pretending to be impressed by his rhodomontade, he is a more or less manageable cat.”
• Rex Stout uses it in the second Nero Wolfe novel, "The League of Frightened Men", when Wolfe says, "If Mr. Chapin had... restrained his impulse to rodomontade..."
• The word, with its alternative spelling is quoted in John Lukacs' book Five Days in London May 1940. While describing the tempestuous days of Churchill's first weeks in office, Lukacs quotes Alexander Cadogan, a bureaucrat with the Foreign Office, counselling Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax who was complaining that he could no longer work with Churchill. Cadogan said:
• Hannah Arendt describes Adolf Eichmann's boasting as "sheer rodomontade" in Eichmann in Jerusalem:
• The term was used in Desert Island Discs by the singer Morrissey when describing his own music.
• Sir Anthony Parsons as UK Ambassador to the United Nations used the word during a speech on 22 May 1982 during a debate of the Security Council. He was describing the speeches of several other members including the USSR, Cuba and Panama during that days debate on the Falklands War. He started the speech by saying:
• William F. Buckley used the word in a May 29, 1995, column in the National Review entitled "What does Clinton have in mind? – Pres. Clinton's attack on conservative radio broadcasts"; Buckley, asking rhetorically whom Clinton was attacking, cited one theory:
• William Makepeace Thackeray uses the word to describe a letter written by the eponymous hero of 'The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq.'.
• The term was used by W. Somerset Maugham in 'Of Human Bondage' in Athelny's conversation, over tea, with his daughter's suitor.
• Vladimir Nabokov criticized Fyodor Dostoevsky for his "gothic rodomontade".
• Roy Jenkins in his biography of Churchill: '..., but also revealed a plain soldier's distaste for the publicity rodomontade which always attended Churchill, and maybe a touch of perverse jealousy too'.