[1] The term verborum bombus is used by the sixteenth-century English rhetorician Richard Sherry in his 1550 book A treatise of Schemes & Tropes.
[2] In it, Sherry says Verborum bombus, when small & triflyng thynges are set out wyth great gasyng wordes.
[3] Sherry mentions the miles gloriosus character from the plays of the Roman playwright Plautus.
I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion (Henry IV, Part 2 1.2.218-221).
One instance of this is in the following passage two cats ... alighting opposite one another on my visage, betook themselves to indecorous contention for the paltry consideration of my nose.