Devil-May-Care Pope?

Today I would like to pontificate on insouciant, and we’ll see where that takes us. I have been reading the monumental (in two senses of the word) third installment in the biography of Winston Churchill, The Last Lion, and this past week the word insouciant has cropped up several times. Not knowing what exactly it meant, I turned to my dictionary for elucidation.

Insouciant is an adjective that means free from concern or worry. Synonyms suggested are carefree and nonchalant. Insouciant is a good word for the phrase “devil-may-care.” In 1799 it arrived in English from the French noun insouciant, which means carelessness, thoughtlessness, or heedlessness. It has a more negative connotation in French than in English. The English noun has become insouciance, while the adjective has kept the French spelling even though its first use was not until 1829.

The French got the word from the Latin word for agitate, sollicitare (to which they added the French prefix in- which means opposite). How they got from “to agitate” to “to care” is not shown, although insouciant certainly can describe someone who does not care or get agitated about things.

There is no word “souciant” in English, because in the 1560s English had previously adopted a Latin form of sollicitare (sollicitus) as the source for the word solicitous, which means restless, uneasy, not carefree.

The Latin word sollicitare is also the source of our word solicit. Sometime in the 1300s the Middle French took the Latin word and used it as the French word soliciter. It meant to disturb or rouse, trouble or harass, but also to stimulate or provoke. Anything that brought one out of their torpor was soliciter. It retained that meaning until the 1520s when the meaning of petition or ask came from the Middle French sense of managing affairs, according to etymonline.com. Eventually as a person “begged the favor” of a woman (a sense that solicit achieved by the 1590s) and it came by 1710 to refer to the “business agreement” reached with a prostitute. Leave it to the libertine French… (libertine means morally or sexually unrestrained).

Libertine originally was used (in the late 1300s) as the word for an emancipated slave. It came from the Latin word libertinus, which designated (etymonline says) a “member of a class of freedmen.” The Latin word liber means “free,” and is also the source of our word liberal, because in the 1560s those who we now call liberals were “freethinking.” Libertin was a word used in France in the 1540s to certain Protestant (freethinking) sects. Within 50 years the word came to describe someone unrestrained in their consumptions (wine, women, song, etc.) There is speculation that the changed meaning comes from the misunderstanding of the use of the Latin word libertinus in Acts 6:9, where it is translated in the King James Version as Libertines and in the New International Version as Freedmen.

Speaking of religious matters, I used the word pontificate in my opening line. When used as a noun it refers to the office of the Pope (hence the title of this post), but when used as a verb can mean to speak in a pompous or dogmatic manner.  It comes from the Latin word for the office of the Pope (pontificatus), and the verb pontificate was first used in 1818 to mean “act as a pontiff.” By 1825 the meaning  “to assume pompous and dignified airs, issue dogmatic decrees” (don’t blame me – that quote is from etymonline.com) came into use. Perhaps that is because Pope Leo XII’s reign was very unpopular due to his (according to Wikipedia) inability to “understand and cope with the social, cultural, and philosophical changes that slowly rose throughout Europe during his reign.”

Pope Leo XII would never be described as insouciant.