365 New Words a Year [Merriam Webster] (Workman Publishing 7/26/7: bombast

bombast n : pretentious inflated speech or writing

Long before Shaggy, "[t]he original definition of bombast was 'cotton or any soft fibrous material used as padding or stuffing'. " It comes from a word meaning 'cotton', "despite the fact that the original . . . and its Greek source refer to silk. Etymologists aren't certain why the shift occurred, though one source attributes it to an error going back to the Roman scholar Pliny, who had reported that cotton was produced by an insect analogous to the silkworm. Bombast has been retained in modern English because it took a figurative sense used in reference to speech or writing. Thus the basic sense of 'stuffing or padding' has survived, but now the stuffing consists of words rather than cotton." Rating 8/10 silkworms.