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Saturday March 13, 2010

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temerity [tuh-MER-uh-tee]

noun

1. Unreasonable contempt of danger; rashness.

• Rodriguez was beaten to a three-bedroom, 35th-floor apartment renting for $40,000 per month - so he slid into a two-bedroom $30,000 unit next door. His reps had the temerity to ask for a discount, but landlord Leroy Schecter turned them down.
  Owen Moritz, "CHOCK FULL OF THE RICH & FAMOUS New bldg. on Central Park West is hot", New York Daily News, Feb 28, 2010
• Salinger's disposition while in Cornish became a matter of legend. Visitors were shooed away, and anyone with the temerity to publicize aspects of his life, whether biographers or journalists, could expect to get sued.
  Alison Leigh Cowan, "Next Stop, the Wilds of New Hampshire", New York Times, Jan 30, 2010
• But if the printing such a work would at that time have been an act of unheard of temerity, the mere act of writing it required a great deal of both courage and prudence, particularly in the position in which she was placed.
  Anne Louise Germaine Necker (1766 - 1817) A French-speaking Swiss author. Ten Years' Exile (1821)

Origin of the Word

Temerity, approximately 1400, derives from Middle French temerite, from Latin temeritas "blind chance, accident, rashness," from temere "by chance, blindly, casually, rashly."