The Word(s) of the Day

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.

anchorite \ANG-kuh-ryte\ noun : a person who lives in seclusion usually for religious reasons

Example sentence: The anchorite spent most of his days in his small, bare cell, engaged in prayer and meditation.

Did you know? The term "anchor" was being used for religious hermits about 450 years before "anchorite" came into common use in our language. The reclusive "anchor" and "anchorite" are both derived from the Late Latin "anachoreta," which, in turn, can be traced to the Greek "anachorein," meaning "to withdraw." Are they etymologically related to the kind of anchors you find on ships? Not exactly. The Latin root of sea-going "anchor,"
"anchora," probably influenced the spelling and pronunciation of the words that led to "anchorite" and the reclusive "anchor," but it is not a direct ancestor.