windbaggery

Windbaggery is the behavior or quality of talking at length in a pompous, unfocused, or empty manner. It describes speeches, posts, or conversations dominated by length over substance, inflated rhetoric, and a sense of performative self-importance rather than clear information or practical outcomes. The term combines windbag, a pejorative for a talkative, pompous person, with the suffix -ery to denote a characteristic or practice. It is primarily used in informal or critical discourse.

Windbaggery is most often encountered in political, media, corporate, and online contexts, where speakers or writers fill discourse with rambling sentences, excessive jargon, redundant qualifiers, and self-promotional anecdotes. Examples include policy speeches that enumerate goals without concrete steps, or meetings and posts that bog down discussion with ornate language and irrelevant details.

The effect of windbaggery can be muted credibility, audience frustration, and impeded decision making, as substance is buried beneath verbosity. Related terms include bombast, grandiloquence, bloviation, and verbose rhetoric; while they share surface features, windbaggery emphasizes habitual, empty talk rather than occasional showiness.

Causes may include social signaling, discomfort with silence, ostentation of expertise, or attempts to project authority. Because it is a subjective judgment, the label is pejorative and not a precise technical category, but it remains a common critique in discussions of communication quality.