Some Rare Words for Rare-Word Buffs

The veteran New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd began a recent piece with some items for rare-word buffs, culled from an Internet site called A.Word.A.Day.:

Donald Trump is a rodomont. Not to mention a grobian. And, of course, a Sinon suffering from proditomania.

Dowd proceeded to provide definitions of these archaic terms. A rodomont is a “vain boaster.” (The word, when I looked it up, turned out to derive from the character of Rodomontade in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.) A Sinon is “one who misleads and betrays” (from a Greek warrior in Homer’s Iliad). A grobian is “a buffoonish person.”