BLOVIATIONS, CONT.

Scifers takes Eder to task for his use of bloviates, while providing a fair example of it himself. While staying at an inn in Talkeetna, Alaska, where Warren G. Harding had slept shortly before his demise, I read mounted on the wall a contemporary news story quoting the President as saying, “I like to go out in the country and bloviate . . . America is the greatest country in the world.”

In short, bloviate seems to mean “to wax rhapsodic, full of hot air,” or perhaps also to get in a lather over nothing. A word of particular utility today, for which I know no adequate substitute, making it a better coinage than Harding’s more ineffable contribution to the tongue: “normalcy.” The OED should have picked it up 70 years ago.

MYRON S. MEISEL

LOS ANGELES