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Rodomontade (/ r ɒ d ə m ɒ n ˈ t ɑː d ˌ-ˈ t eɪ d /) is a mass noun meaning boastful talk or behavior. The term is a reference to Rodomonte, a character in the Italian Renaissance epic poem Orlando innamorato and its sequel Orlando furioso.
One child boasting to another. The Ancient Greek book The Characters of Theophrastus devotes a chapter to "The Boastful Man". [6]Bēot is Old English for a ritualized boast, vow, threat or promise, which was usually made by an Anglo-Saxon warrior on the eve of or during battle.
The origins of the word predate the 1778 arrival of Captain James Cook, as recorded in several chants stemming from that time. [4] [5] The term was generally given to people of European descent; however, as more distinct terms began to be applied to individual European cultures and other non-European nations, the word haole began to refer mostly to Americans, including American Blacks (who ...
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder is the earliest to attest that the story reflects the behaviour of real-life corvids. [13] In August 2009, a study published in Current Biology revealed that rooks, a relative of crows, do just the same as the crow in the fable when presented with a similar situation. [14]
Peter Fryer's book Mrs Grundy: Studies in English Prudery concerns prudish behaviour, such as the use of euphemisms for underwear. Jack London uses Mrs Grundy in his books The People of the Abyss and The Sea-Wolf. In the former he describes the early twentieth century attitude of the English working class towards drunkenness: "Mrs Grundy rules ...
Synonyms are often from the different strata making up a language. For example, in English, Norman French superstratum words and Old English substratum words continue to coexist. [11] Thus, today there exist synonyms like the Norman-derived people, liberty and archer, and the Saxon-derived folk, freedom and bowman.
The Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) is a complete database of all the words in the Oxford English Dictionary and other dictionaries (including Old English), arranged by semantic field and date. In this way, the HTE arranges the whole vocabulary of English, from the earliest written records in Old English to the present, alongside dates of ...
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. A modern english thesaurus. A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms ...