Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
BUMPTIOUS
We have a number of ways to refer to self-important people. Pompous comes to mind, as do haughty, supercilious, and pretentious. This week's word, bumptious, (pronounced BUMP-shus) identifies a particular subset of the self-important: Merriam-Webster identifies the key characteristics as being "presumptuously, obtusely, and often noisily self-assertive."
The word suggests trying too hard in an unpolished, almost juvenile manner.
Though the personality type is ancient, the word only cropped up in English around 1800. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it is a jocular formation from bump, noun or verb, "a heavy blow," or "to thump."
Example: Tanya Schevitz, "Eat Your Heart Out, Harvard," in the San Francisco Chronicle's Insight, 2002: "The sometimes bumptious Summers has been bending noses at Harvard, as he did at times in the Clinton administration."