As bombast and as living to the time.
Decker, in his Satyromastix, says, “You shall swear not to bombast out a new play with the old linings of jests.” And Guazzo, Civile Conversation, 1591,—“Studie should rather make him leane and thinne, and pull out the bombast of his corpulent doublet.”
Hence, by easy transition from the falseness of padding or puffing out a figure, bombast came to signify swelling pretentiousness of speech and conduct as an adapted meaning; and gradually this became the primary and only sense.
Buxom.—This word is simply bow-some or bough-some, i.e., that which readily bows, or bends, or yields like the boughs of a tree. No longer ago than when Milton wrote boughsome, which as gh in English began to lose its guttural sound,—that of the letter chi in Greek,—came to be written buxom, meant simply yielding, and was of general application.
——“and, this once known, shall soon return,
And bring ye to the place where thou and Death
Shall dwell at ease, and up and down unseen
Wing silently the buxom air.”—Paradise Lost, II. 840.
But aided, doubtless, as Dr. Johnson suggests, by a too liberal construction of the bride’s promise in the old English marriage ceremony, to be “obedient and buxom in bed and board,” it came to be applied to women who were erroneously thought likely to be thus yielding; and hence it now means plump, rosy, alluring, and is applied only to women who combine those qualities of figure, face and expression.