libertine, professoriate, womanising

Spy, traveller, writer, librarian and prolific lover: Giacomo Casanova was born on April 2nd 1725. An embodiment of libertine values, he might be proud that his name is best known for its associations with womanising

'The Only Son'

By STÉPHANE AUDEGUY
Reviewed by JUDITH WARNER This novel creates the voice of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s libertine brother.


There’s no aspect of our language, written, spoken or grunted, that escapes Blount appraisal. Like that other lay linguist H. L. Mencken, who beat the pros at their own game with “The American Language,” he figures that if amateurs are qualified to create language and authorized to mutate it, why leave the fun of tasting, dissecting and quarreling over it to the professoriate?

professoriate

(prō'fĭ-sôr'ē-ət, -sōr'-, prŏf'ĭ-)

or pro·fes·so·ri·at n.

1. The rank or office of a professor.
2. College or university professors considered as a group.

libertine

n.

1. One who acts without moral restraint; a dissolute person.
2. One who defies established religious precepts; a freethinker.

adj.
Morally unrestrained; dissolute.

[Middle English, freedman, from Latin lībertīnus, from lībertus, from līber, free.]

lib・er・tine


━━ n. 放蕩(ほうとう)者; 自由思想家.
lib・er・tin・ism
　━━ n. 放蕩, 道楽; 自由思想.