fanfaronade

But all that is gone - razors need honing if they are to retain their keenness, and so this tame fanfaronade was more than excuse for Birmingham's males to indulge their fetish for cross-dressing than anything else.

About twenty pages farther on, there is a fanfaronade of phony and comically deformed proverbs.

As for calabash, calabaza, cork, fanfare, fanfaron, fanfaronade, haras, harras, harridan, mask, masque, masquerade, masquery, matador, tripe, troubadour, Wartburg (Dictionnaire etymologique de la langue francaise [Paris, 1968]) and Corominas (Breve diccionario etimologico de la lengua catellana [Madrid, 1973]) give different etymologies.

Better to admit that one is doing a job, fulfilling a function, than carrying on a fanfaronade of high-mindedness that might be credible in the context of Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and William Morris, but which hardly seems adequate to our own noisier and debased times.

"How many more of these fanfaronades shall I see before death?" weary international art-world power brokers and factotums might well wonder.