MOUNTEBANK: 1: a person who sells quack medicines from a platform 2: a boastful unscrupulous pretender: charlatan
Add up the components of the Italian montimbanco, formed by combining the verb montare ("to mount"), the preposition in (converted to im, meaning "on" in this case), and the noun banco ("bench"), and you have the literal definition of "mountebank": someone mounted on a bench. Here, the "bench" is the platform on which 16th- and 17th- century charlatans stood to sell their phony medicines. Mountebanks often included various forms of light entertainment onstage in order to attract customers. Later, extended uses of "mountebank" referred to people who falsely claim to have knowledge about a particular subject or to those who simply pretend to be something they're not in order to gain attention.
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