Less Penguiny's definition: “Bragging is personally imposing what-you-believe-to-be-status-elevating thoughts on your audience.”
1. The Bare-Bones Brag is directly telling your audience of Your Greatness. No effort at deniability is made; the brag is served raw without any need for inference on the audience’s behalf.
Robin Hobb: “The person who must brag for themselves knows that no one else will.”
Aw, dang it, I'm guilty. It's so interesting most of the articles and quotes key to the speaker's imputed insecurities, spoken by someone in the audience. Doesn't quite match me, I'm boasting because I feel great and want people to know. After all, they were not there. Found a quote about fools bragging and wise folks staying quiet. And research I saw supported that keeping a positive secret ADDS to a sense of strength. Implying that sharing a positive secret is a weakener.
Which might be the sadly on point for me. Right after a brag I'm exposed to out-of-awareness errors, mistakes, or accidents. It has always felt like I was being punished for being good at something.
I have always attributed that to my father's withholding support for my interests if they failed to align with his or his peers approval. What would people think? And there was the silence around "routine" high achievement like mAking high grAdes. This little playing with spelling would probably annoy him. He would move to correct me. What if people thought I didn't know how to spell?
I have to deliberately ignore, work around, or push pass this inner restricter, and when I break through, which is hard work and thus rare, I'm excited about it and want to run to my daddy and have him say, "Great. Good Job!" and pin the freaking picture up on the fridge.
That child in me is "bragging" seeking dad's, or anyone's, ready and instant approval. Oddly, only a handful out of a hundred "get me" when I do that and feed me what I'm needing. I forget, therefore, and "brag" to audiences who don't care and are likely put off and therefore "cut me down" to size. A tactic of my dad used as well. Hey, folks (dad), I'm pre-cut to "size" already. Put the ax away. But they don't.
So the counter-weight to this is people who feel insecure and smaller when hearing of someone's achievement as a boast or brag. Rather than looking inward and dealing with their emotions, they "cut" or belittle, or one-up the alleged braggart.