Word of the Day

: June 29, 2007

pococurante

adjective POH-koh-kyoo-RAN-tee

What It Means

: indifferent, nonchalant

pococurante in Context

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 "glōssa," 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.