Around 1616, Shakespeare finished “As You Like It,” in which Rosalind mentions “Caesar’s thrasonicall bragge of I came, saw, and conquered.” Likewise, Thomas Carte’s “A General History of England,” from 1754, points out that “It is too thrasonical to deserve any credit.” I don’t know what he meant by “it”.
“Thrasonical,” though, is quite clear, although also very obscure. It refers to “Thraso”, a character in a Roman play written in about 160 BCE by “Terence” (in ancient Rome he was known as Terentius). Thraso was a soldier, and evidently had one particularly defining trait: he was a braggart. If you call someone “thrasonical”, you’re saying they do too much boasting. The word also carries (or once did) an implication that the boasting is done in an especially wordy way.
This is called out by a passage in “Notes and Queries” from 1893. It’s offering advice to anyone who wants to be an author or an orator:
“Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabical profundity, pompous prolixity, and ventriloquial vapidity. Shun double-entendre and prurient jocosity, whether obscure or apparent. In other words, speak truthfully, naturally, clearly, purely, but do not use large words.”
This is exactly what we teach aspiring technical writers, even today!
