Crossword clues for fustian
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fustian \Fus"tian\, a.
Made of fustian.
Pompous; ridiculously tumid; inflated; bombastic; as, fustian history.
--Walpole.
Fustian \Fus"tian\, n. [OE. fustan, fustian, OF. fustaine, F. futaine, It. fustagno, fr. LL. fustaneum, fustanum; cf. Pr. fustani, Sp. fustan. So called from Fust[=a]t, i. e., Cairo, where it was made.]
A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff, including corduroy, velveteen, etc.
-
An inflated style of writing; a kind of writing in which high-sounding words are used, above the dignity of the thoughts or subject; bombast.
Claudius . . . has run his description into the most wretched fustian.
--Addison.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"thick cotton cloth," 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" (see fustigate) 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.
Wiktionary
n. 1 A kind of coarse twilled cotton or cotton and linen stuff. 2 A class of cloth including corduroy and velveteen. 3 Pompous, inflated or pretentious writing or speech.
WordNet
Wikipedia
Fustian is a variety of heavy cloth woven from cotton, chiefly prepared for menswear. It is also used figuratively to refer to pompous, inflated or pretentious writing or speech, from at least the time of Shakespeare. This literary use is because the cloth type was often used as padding, hence, the purposeless words are fustian.
Usage examples of "fustian".
I set you down in my shop at Norwich you might scarce tell fustian from falding, and know little difference between the velvet of Genoa and the three-piled cloth of Bruges.
By contrast, the senior enchantress just in from Tysan presented herself for audience in humbled quiet, her fustian clothes still wrinkled from the road, and her seamed features chalky with weariness.
A fourth miscalls all by the name of fustian, that his grounded capacity cannot aspire to.
Constituent from Rennes who had been celebrated for seating himself in the Estates-General in a plain brown fustian coat, apparently the very paragon of bucolic simplicity promoted in the Rousseauean code of social morality.
The rich smells of coffee and cinnamon mingled with the faintly prickly velvetiness of dust, the steamy whiff from the laundry in the next street, the odor of privies and stale cheap cooking, a strange, slubbed tapestry of fustian and silk.
Myles was polishing his bascinet with lard and wood-ashes, rubbing the metal with a piece of leather, and wiping it clean with a fustian rag.
And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising.
This amusement is superintended by the friar, according to the recurrence of certain fustian words, to be repeated by every compotator in turn before he drank—a species of high jinks, as it were, by which they regulated their potations, as toasts were given in latter times.
Stevenson, when he had thought of Jekyll and Hyde, had seized upon a theme that was Dostoyevskian, but he had worked it out in terms of what some people might call Romance, but the genius regretfully had to use the word fustian.
Jones, who was drest in a suit of fustian, and had by his side the weapon formerly purchased of the serjeant.
There are some features of this new passenger liner the Fustians are putting together that I want to look into.
A few mature Fustians lumbered heavily along in the shade of the low buildings, audibly wheezing under the burden of their immense carapaces.
He waved a stumpy arm toward a group of shell-less Fustians standing by a massive hoist.
The Fustians winced at the, to them, supersonic vibrations, and looked at each other muttering.
Stained and blotched with weather and patched with coarse brown and butternut fustians, the dull purples and greens of Antryg's coat and cloak seemed to blend uncannily with the fog as he moved away.