Insouciance

 WORD OF THE DAY

insouciance / noun / in-SOO-see-unss

Definition
1: lighthearted unconcern
2: nonchalance

Examples
"Perhaps coming home hadn't been such a great idea after all. Instead of her mother's insouciance rubbing off on Liv, she'd just sunk further into the mires of misery as she realised that the weight of the world was resting squarely on her shoulders." 
— Clare Naylor, Dog Handling, 2002

"… the idea of French style as we understand it today hasn't been built on craftsmanship. Rather, it's been built on a philosophy: one that proclaims the character, insouciance and authenticity of its wearer. A prime example of it in action? On the big screen, in Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave films."
— Faye Fearon, InsideHook, 4 Dec. 2020

Did You Know?
Don't worry; be insouciant. Perhaps your mind will rest easier if we explain that English speakers learned insouciance (as well as the adjective insouciant) from the French around the early 1800s.
The French word comes from a combination of the negative prefix in- and soucier, meaning "to trouble or disturb."
Soucier, in turn, traces to sollicitus, the Latin word for "anxious." If it seems to you that sollicitus looks a lot like some other English words you've seen, you're on to something.
That root also gave us solicit (which now means "to entreat" but which was once used to mean "to fill with concern or anxiety"), solicitude (meaning "uneasiness of mind"), and solicitous ("showing or expressing concern").

Jeopardy

 WORD OF THE DAY

jeopardy / noun / JEP-er-dee

Definition
1a: exposure to or imminence of death, loss, or injury
1b: danger
2 (law): the danger that an accused person is subjected to when on trial for a criminal offense

Examples
Rather than risk placing passengers in jeopardy, the pilot waited for the storm to pass before taking off.

"… and cornerback Richard Sherman's in jeopardy of missing the last two games with calf stiffness that has bothered him since September."
— Chris Biderman, The Sacramento (California) Bee, 23 Dec. 2020

Did You Know?
Geoffrey Chaucer employed the word jeopardy in his late 14th-century masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, but its Middle English form can make it hard to spot: it appears in the phrase "in jupartie" with a meaning very much akin to the word's meaning in the modern phrase "in jeopardy"—that is, "in danger."
The spellings of what we now render only as jeopardy were formerly myriad. The Oxford English Dictionary reports that between the late 14th and mid-17th centuries the word was spelled in a great variety of ways, among them iuperti, yoberte, iepardye, ieoberye, and jobardy.

Itinerant

 WORD OF THE DAY

itinerant / adjective / eye-TIN-uh-runt

Definition
: traveling from place to place, especially covering a circuit

Examples
"Born on a small farm near Yuma, Arizona, Cesar Chavez entered the whirlpool of itinerant labor as a child after his family lost possession of their ranch. They moved wherever the harvest took them."
— Ilan Stavans, Cesar Chavez: A Photographic Essay, 2009

"At some point Coleman became a Methodist, a denomination whose teachings were being spread by Jesse Lee and other itinerant preachers."
— The Ridgefield (Connecticut) Press, 3 Dec. 2020

Did You Know?
In Latin, iter means "way" or "journey."
That root was the parent of the Late Latin verb itinerari, meaning "to journey."
It was that verb which ultimately gave rise to the English word for traveling types: itinerant.
The linguistic grandparent, iter, also contributed to the development of other English words, including itinerary ("the route of a journey" and "the plan made for a journey") and errant ("traveling or given to traveling," as in knight-errant).