Meaning
Ceremonial splendor and ostentatious display - the full show of grandeur, formality, and parade that surrounds an important occasion, often with a hint that the fuss and finery may outweigh the substance beneath. Often faintly ironic, mocking empty formality; in North America the phrase alone evokes Elgar's graduation march, an association largely absent in Britain, where Land of Hope and Glory dominates. Regional use: General English (Shakespearean allusion); strong North American graduation association.
Origin
The words are Othello's, in Othello Act 3 Scene 3: lamenting the collapse of his military identity, he lists the glories he is losing - 'Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!' In Elizabethan English circumstance could mean the ceremony or ado made about something, so the line inventories war's pageantry, and the Phrase Finder credits Shakespeare with the coinage, noting the earliest exact two-word match in Philip Massinger's The Bashful Lover, written around 1640. Edward Elgar took the phrase for his Pomp and Circumstance Marches: Marches Nos. 1 and 2 both appeared in 1901, No. 1 premiering in Liverpool on 19 October 1901 with Elgar conducting, and its trio melody becoming Land of Hope and Glory in 1902. The American graduation tradition began at Yale on 28 June 1905, when Elgar attended commencement to receive an honorary Doctor of Music; the trio is now the near-universal processional at graduations in the United States, Canada, and the Philippines, which is why many Americans know the phrase mainly as the graduation song.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- all the pomp and circumstance
- full pomp and circumstance
- pomp and ceremony
Usage Examples
- The embassy hired a brass band and rolled out a red carpet; the ambassador clearly believes diplomacy is impossible without pomp and circumstance.
- Graduates lined up in the gym as the band struck up the pomp and circumstance march their grandparents had also walked to.
- Stripped of its pomp and circumstance, the award ceremony turned out to be forty minutes of speeches and one small engraved plaque.