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• bumptious •

Pronunciation: bêmp-shês • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective

Meaning: Offensively assertive, obnoxiously pushy, arrogantly forward.

Notes: Bumptious behavior is thoughtless and shows no concern for others. Someone who talks incessantly without listening to others is bumptious. Today's funny little word has an adverb, bumptiously, and a noun, bumptiousness.

In Play: Any behavior that is offensively assertive might be called 'bumptious': "I found the man more than a bit brusque; I found him absolutely bumptious in the way he dominated every conversation." However, other things may be bumptious, too: "Biff Wellington wrote a bumptious review of his sister's restaurant praising the cuisine to the hilt."

Word History: Today's Good Word is a linguistically recent addition to the English vocabulary; it first appeared in publication in 1803. It is a humorous concoction of the verb bump + the suffix found on such adjectives as fractious, infectious, and rambunctious. Bump is onomatopoetic like thump, and as such seems to be purely English. (Today's Good Word was recommended by Jeremy Busch, a decidedly unbumptious Grand Panjandrum in the Alpha Agora.)

We have a 90-pound three-year-old German Shepherd dog who has earned the sobriquet Bodacious Brinker the Bumptious GSD, but it's all well-meaning in its descriptiveness. He's smart and very good-natured and treats every person he meets as his New Best Friend. He's just so enthusiastic about it all - ergo, the name; but so named in good humor. He's quite charming, just a bit bombastic in action, but generally a very likeable and well-behaved fellow. So I guess that "bumptious"doesn't have to be a negative always?

Not always.

bumptious: humorously hunchbacked, e.g. Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein.

Yeah, Marty was great. Now that I consider it, there are similarities between Feldman's performance and Brink's nature.