complaisant/complacent
Jul. 17th, 2009 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordcomplaisant - adj., inclined or disposed to please others, obliging, compliant.
complacent - adj., pleased with oneself or one's merits, advantages, situation, and so on, smug, unconcerned.
A pair of words I regularly confuse and misspell, as do others, as complacent is sometimes used as a synonym of complaisant (though not the other way around). From the same Latin root, the past participle of complacēre, to take the fancy of, please, but complaisant arrived (as you might expect by the spelling) through French while complacent was adopted direct. Curiously, the adoptions were done nearly at the same time: complaisant in around 1640, complacent around 1650. Complaisant is pronounced either kum-PLAY-sunt or KOM-pleh-zant, while the fully anglicized complacent is only kum-PLAY-sunt.
---L.
complacent - adj., pleased with oneself or one's merits, advantages, situation, and so on, smug, unconcerned.
A pair of words I regularly confuse and misspell, as do others, as complacent is sometimes used as a synonym of complaisant (though not the other way around). From the same Latin root, the past participle of complacēre, to take the fancy of, please, but complaisant arrived (as you might expect by the spelling) through French while complacent was adopted direct. Curiously, the adoptions were done nearly at the same time: complaisant in around 1640, complacent around 1650. Complaisant is pronounced either kum-PLAY-sunt or KOM-pleh-zant, while the fully anglicized complacent is only kum-PLAY-sunt.
---L.
