Bloviate: A Great and (unfortunately) Useful Word

Boston.com ran a piece today called "The Meanies of Life: TV and film bullies we love to hate". It included some all-time names like Biff Tannen from Back to the Future ("McFlyyyy") and Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket (um, too many good quotes to list). There were other, actually nefarious characters on the list to be sure, but I found one that actually made me cringe: Ann Coulter.

Yes, she has "blonde hair, intemperate venom" and her "Weapon of Choice" is well encapsulated in the phrase "[the] Politics of outrage", but it's the description of why she was put on the list that put it in perspective for me:

Who to choose among the conservative blovation spectrum? No contest: Limbaugh may be louder, O'Reilly more self-righteous, but no one delivers a verbal rope-burn with more thuggish glee than Coulter. The meanest Mean Girl of them all, she'd doubtless take that as a compliment.

And there it was. "Bloviation". I had to look it up to get a better idea of what it was. One definition was the following:

To bloviate means "to speak pompously and excessively." A colloquial verb coined in the United States, it is commonly used with contempt to describe the behavior of politicians, academics, pundits, or media "experts," sometimes called bloviators, who hold forth on subjects in an arrogant, tiresome way.

I realized I had finally found the word to encapsulate all that I loathe about politics today. People bloviate too much. How can one have a conversation with this type of person? You can't. You don't even get to agree or disagree. You're choices are to either listen or leave; talking means nothing to these people. It's their way or...well, their way.

The irony is that they feel they have to educate, to get out the truth (or what they think it is, anyway), when in reality the means through which they try to do so has the exact opposite effect - no one wants to listen to imperious babble from an overbearing, self-important blowhard.

...er, bloviator.