Yes, it’s Weird Word time once again—and this (I think) is just about the weirdest word I have recorded in these columns.
But let’s start with the pronunciation (as an old broadcaster that’s always what I want to master first)—and the Oxford English Dictionary says we should say it like this: poh-koh-kyuh-RAN-tee (which I don’t think is all that hard; try a few times and you’ll get the hang of it).
It means ‘a careless, indifferent, or nonchalant person.’
It’s first recorded in English in 1762, and it comes from the Italian expression poco curante meaning (literally) ‘caring little.’
Which in turn comes from the present participle of the Italian word for ‘care’ curare with the addition of poco meaning ‘little.’
In 1759 the French writer Voltaire wrote Candide in which he gave his characters allegorical names.
One of these is the apathetic Venetian Senator Pococurante, whose name appropriately means ‘caring little’ in Italian—because that’s what this character simply doesn’t care about anything.
Then the word came into English when Lawrence Stern borrowed the expression and used it in his brilliant (if bizarre) novel Tristram Shandy—where the word is used by Tristram Shandy about his mother.
So there the word was used not as a name but as a description of character.
It is, as you might expect, a distinctly rare word.
In the citations under the definition in the big Oxford there are only ten quotations between 1762 and 1995.
Now, of course, it must have been used many more times than ten, but, still, the number of citations is guide to how common a word is (very common words have columns of citations in the Oxford).
And, in fact, the Oxford tells the frequency with which today’s Weird Word appears in our language. ‘Pococurante’ occurs fewer than 0.01 times per million words in modern written English.
That’s not a lot.
Often with these Weird Words I issue the challenge ‘Can you find a way to work this word into your conversation sometime this week?'
I’m less sure about the validity of such a challenge with ‘pococurante’ (even after you’ve practiced saying it a few times).
I suppose if someone asks you if you care about something you could reply ‘I’m really pococurante about that’ (meaning ‘I couldn’t care less.’)
That should get their attention!
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