“The original meaning of "bombast" is instructive [....]: cotton wool used as padding or stuffing for clothes, from which it came to have its figurative meaning of inflated or turgid language.
Cotton, that's to say, in its inchoate condition, before it's been spun into cloth; language, therefore, not yet formulated into meaning. Further, those parts of the anatomy liable to be augmented with bombast were usually those associated with a mature development. The analogy holds for bombastic prose.”