pococurante: M-W's Word of the Day

****************************************************************
Introducing WORD SWEEP!, the first board game to feature Merriam-Webster definitions! Enjoy hours of challenging fun. Try it at:
http://www.wordsweep.com

****************************************************************

The Word of the Day for June 29 is:

pococurante \POH-koh-kyoo-RAN-tee\ adjective
: indifferent, nonchalant

Example sentence:
At the ball, the snobbish debutante offended many would-be suitors by responding to their greetings in a pococurante manner.

Did you know?
The French writer Voltaire carefully named his characters in _Candide_ (1759) to create allegories. He appended the prefix "pan-," meaning "all," to "glossa," the Greek word for "tongue," to name his optimistic tutor "Pangloss," a sobriquet suggesting glibness and talkativeness. Then there is the apathetic Venetian Senator Pococurante, whose name appropriately means "caring little" in Italian. Voltaire's characters did not go unnoticed by later writers. Laurence Sterne used "Pococurante" in part six of _Tristram Shandy_, published three years after _Candide_, to mean "a careless person," and Irish poet Thomas Moore first employed the word as an adjective when he described Dublin as a poco-curante place in his memoirs of 1815.

You Are Subscribed As: silentdewdrops.word@blogger.com
To unsubscribe, change your e-mail address or to subscribe to the html
version of Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day, featuring audio
pronunciations, please visit:

http://mw.drhinternet.net/sm/wod/changeofaddress.iphtml

(c) 2007 by Merriam-Webster, Incorporated

Merriam-Webster, Inc.
47 Federal Street
P.O. Box 281
Springfield, MA 01102