To arrogate is to "take or claim (something) for oneself without justification." Arrogance, then, is not exactly boastfulness or pride, but a a kind of appropriation. To be arrogant is to say that one has special privileges, that the normal rules don't apply to me.
I can be proud or boastful, but I try not to be arrogant.
When that word came to me years ago I thought I was making it up. I was a PhD student. It seemed to me that too many young academics talked (and wrote) as though they had been humiliated in some way. The solution, it seemed to me, was for university administrations to begin to "arrogate" them instead. It is not entirely wrong to say that what I meant was that they should be infused with a stronger sense of their "special privileges". (I, of course, was fully arrogant at the time.)
ResponderEliminarI like the invented meaning of "arrogate"= "to instill with confidence."
ResponderEliminar