[f. SWAGGER v.]
1. The action of swaggering; external conduct or personal behavior marked by an air of superiority or defiant or insolent disregard of others.
1725. Swift, New Song on Wood’s Halfpence, viii. The butcher is stout, and he values no swagger.
1809. Malkin, Gil Blas, IV. v. ¶ 3. She could put on as brazen-faced a swagger as the most impudent dog in town.
1811. Sporting Mag., XXXVII. 86. After much swagger, he asked the constable if he knew who he was?
1871. L. Stephen, Playgr. Eur. (1894), v. 117. Tall, spare,… with a jovial laugh and a not ungraceful swagger.
1877. Mrs. Forrester, Mignon, I. 21. A man who has outgrown the swagger and affectations of boyhood, and settled down into a … respectable member of society.
1885. Rider Haggard, K. Solomon’s Mines, v. He was an impudent fellow, and … his swagger was outrageous.
b. transf. Applied to a mental or intellectual attitude marked by the same characteristics.
1819. Keats, Otho, I. i. No military swagger of my mind, Can smother from myself the wrong I’ve done him.
1840. De Quincey, Rhet., Wks. 1859, XI. 33. As to Chrysostom and Basil, with less of pomp and swagger than Gregory, they have not at all more of rhetorical burnish and compression.
1869. Ld. Coleridge, in E. H. Coleridge, Life & Corr. (1904), II. vi. 165. The mingled swagger and cowardice of the whole transaction.
1908. Athenæum, 5 Dec., 727/1. He respects the public, contempt for whom is at the root of most artistic display and swagger.
2. Short for swagger-cane: see SWAGGER-. mod. colloq.
