[This word is based on the stereotype of people from Gascon, France as being braggarts]. Italian journalist Luigi Barzin … cites Edmond Rostand’s fictional Cyrano as the quintessence of French character, at least as outsiders exaggerate it: the boastful, cocksure Gascon whose fellow provincials are defined in Rostand’s play as ‘’free fighters, free lovers, free spenders, defenders of old homes, old names and old splendors … bragging of crests and pedigrees.’’ (James Walsh, If Geography Is Destiny …, Time International, 07/15/1991, p. 8.)
This word, when used in the above sense and when referencing a person can also be a synonym for conceited, bravado, egotistical, showoff and swaggering.
Leave a Reply