Gasconade

 WORD OF THE DAY

gasconade / noun / gas-kuh-NAYD

Definition
1a: bravado
1b: boasting

Examples
"His malevolence was only equalled by his audacity,—and this was, if possible, surpassed by his gasconade."
— Nathaniel Pitt Langford, Vigilante Days and Ways, 1996

His early career was marked by the sort of gasconade many fans of the NFL had come to adore and many MLB executives and players had come to loathe.
— Robert Klemko, The MMQB, 13 July 2017

Did You Know?
The citizens of Gascony in southwestern France have proverbially been regarded as prone to bragging.
Their reputation has been immortalized in such swashbuckling literary works as Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers" and Edmond Rostand's "Cyrano de Bergerac".
Linguistically, the legend survives in the word gascon, meaning "a swaggering person" or "braggart," as well as in gasconade itself.

Doff

WORD OF THE DAY

doff / verb / DAHF

Definition
1a: to remove (an article of wear) from the body
1b: to take off (the hat) in greeting or as a sign of respect
2a: to rid oneself of 
2b: put aside
2c: to show respect to 
2d: salute

Examples
"The public address announcer asked fans to salute the field of 33 cars as they zipped around the illustrious track on the warm-up lap. Thousands and thousands of fans doffed their caps and roared in approval of the drivers."
— Dan Gelston, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 31 May 2021

Did You Know?
Time was, people talked about doffing and donning articles of clothing with about the same frequency.
But in the mid-19th century the verb don became significantly more popular and left doff to flounder a bit in linguistic semi-obscurity.
Doff and don have been a pair from the start: both date to the 14th century, with doff arising as a Middle English contraction of the phrase "to do off" and don as a contraction of "to do on."
Shakespeare was among the first, as far as we know, to use the word as it's defined in the more general sense of "to rid oneself of" or "put aside."
He has Juliet give voice to this sense when she says, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet. / … Romeo, doff thy name; / And for that name, which is no part of thee, / Take all myself."

Regnant

 WORD OF THE DAY

regnant / adjective / REG-nunt

Definition:
1a: exercising rule
1b: reigning
2a: having the chief power
2b: dominant
2c: of common or widespread occurrence

Examples
The trope tends to elegize artists who are perceived to be ahead of their time or otherwise inimical to regnant conventions.
— Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 19 July 2021

Their leaders speak with a regnant air, hammering the notion that their return to power is all but inevitable.
— Los Angeles Times, 18 July 2021

Did You Know?
The origin of regnant is straightforward: it comes from the Latin verb regnare, meaning "to reign."
Regnare, in turn, traces back to the noun regnum, meaning "reign."
(Regnum was bestowed with the meaning "kingdom" in English.)
These words ultimately descend from rex, the Latin for "king" and a word familiar to those who have read or seen the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex.