Meaning of fanfaronade | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Empty, self-assertive boasting; an instance of such behaviour.
   countable, uncountable
2. Loud, showy display, celebration or proclamation (of something), sometimes involving the playing of trumpets or other musical instruments.
   countable, uncountable

Examples

“[…] the Gasconads of France, Rodomontads of Spain, Fanfaronads of Italy, and Bragadochio brags of all other countries, could no more astonish his invincible heart, then would the cheeping of a mouse a bear robbed of her whelps.”

“1828, Walter Scott, The Surgeon’s Daughter in Chronicles of the Canongate, Boston: Samuel H. Parker, p. 78, [he] was an enemy to every thing that approached to fanfaronade, and knew enough of the world to lay it down as a sort of general rule, that he who talks a great deal of fighting is seldom a brave soldier”

“Until 1932 they had been right. National Socialism had been a stigma. Among well-born Germans, the Nazi party was regarded as coarse. But that autumn, they were beginning to understand that the door of history had been shut on their Augustan Age of princes and potentates and plumed marshals and glittering little regular armies—on all the fanfaronade that had marked their disciplined, secure world.”

““Cedric took us out to celebrate his signing a contract for his novel, being so damned ostentatious about his new affluence. I didn't want to rain on his fanfaronade […]””

“With a fanfaronade of welcome they lowered their drawbridges”

“1877, Frances Hodgson Burnett, That Lass o’ Lowrie’s, London: F. Warne, p. 55, he dined in public—a fanfaronade of trumpets proclaiming his down-sitting and his up-rising”

“[…] we sailed gracefully out of the hotel yard, Rattray too- tooing a fanfaronade on the horn.”

“Mrs. Burnside indicated her disapproval of all this with a fanfaronade of flatulence.”

“Here, at apparently reasonable prices, is a fanfaronade of cakes decorated electric pink, yellow, or blue.”

CEFR level