Word of the Day!

fustian [fuhs-chuhn]

noun:
1 a stout fabric of cotton and flax
2 inflated or turgid language in writing or speaking
adjective:
1 pompous or bombastic, as language
2 worthless; cheap

Examples:

Freed of the architectural fustian of the Frick's Gilded Age home, the art breathes anew, each painting in its own world rather than entwined with others as part of a decorative ensemble. (Philip Kennicott, Sotheby’s purchase of the former Whitney Museum is a quiet tragedy, The Washington Post, June 2023)

The original play was apparently a bit of a screed against the 'New York idea of marriage,' to wit: "Marry for whim and leave the rest to luck and the divorce courts!" Auburn's gutted the script of all such regressive fustian, but in its place, he suggests nothing more thrilling, dramatic, or socially destabilizing than gentle rom-com symmetries. (Scott Brown, Stage Dive: David Auburn’s Back! Sort Of, New York Vulture, January 2011)

Before him all was staid, orderly, scripted and largely confined to the studio. It was fustian, beige, humdrum. (Matthew Fort, Why we love Keith Floyd, The Guardian, August 2009)

"Pooh!" said Sophy. "Mind your horses, Charles, and don't talk fustian to me." (Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy)

The knight is first dressed in a doublet of fustian, lined with satin, which is cut with holes for ventilation. (Charles John Ffoulkes, Armour & Weapons)

Yes, there were swells here, ball-room coxcombs in fustian and felt. (Charles Maurice Davies, Mystic London: or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis)

Origin:

c 1200, from Old French fustaigne, fustagne (12c, Modern French futaine), from Medieval Latin fustaneum, perhaps from Latin fustis 'staff, stick of wood; cudgel, club' as a loan-translation of Greek xylina lina 'linens of wood' (i.e. 'cotton'). But the Medieval Latin word also is sometimes said to be from Fostat, town near Cairo where this cloth was manufactured. [Klein finds this derivation untenable.] Figurative sense of 'pompous, inflated language' recorded by 1590s. (Online Etymology Dictionary)

Fustian first entered English in the 13th century, by way of Anglo-French, as a term for a kind of fabric. (Its ultimate Latin source is probably the word fustis, meaning 'tree trunk'.) Several centuries into use as a noun and an attributive noun, fustian spread beyond textiles to describe pretentious writing or speech. Christopher Marlowe was a pioneer in the word's semantic expansion: in his 16th-century play Doctor Faustus, he employs the word in this new way when the student Wagner says, "Let thy left eye be diametarily [sic] fixed upon my right heel, with quasi vestigiis nostris insistere," and the clown replies, "God forgive me, he speaks Dutch fustian." And later, the titular doctor himself is called 'Dr Fustian' repeatedly by a horse dealer - an apt misnomer considering the Doctor's speech habits. (Merriam-Webster)